Copy Hackers Conversion Copywriting

Course: Home Pages

Transcript – Week 2 of 10
TIME TRANSCRIPTED AUDIO NOTES
0:01 – The Welcome back. Great that you’re still with me, that’s
Introduction awesome! I hope that you enjoyed last week’s session I
know there was a lot of information and maybe it felt a
little long but early on I mean throughout first phase we
are going to find that there’s quite a bit of work you do
and you’re doing that work now to make phase 2 and
phase 3 a lot easier, actually it’ll make phase 2 a lot
easier and should make phase 3 more pleasant with
better results.

Now, how did your homework go? You’re supposed to

do a least an Amazon review, and alternatively, my goal,
my hope is that you did both an Amazon review and a
competitor content audit and that you now have those
maybe you saved them in a folder that you can use for
yourself obviously for the rest of this course. The
research folder, the conversion course, whatever you
want to call it, I do hope you are compiling all this stuff
in a way where you will be able to refer back to it long
after this course is done.

If you had any trouble with that homework, Id

encourage you to sign up for an office hour session if you
haven’t already and bring those questions to the office
hour session. Just want to drive home the point that
every office session is run by students, so you’re a
student and it’s up to you to bring questions, and
otherwise I will just be sitting there, twiddling my
thumbs, um, waiting for questions.

So, bring your best questions, chances are good that if

you’re wondering something others are too, we’ll record
those sessions and post them online as well, so for those
who can’t attend office hours, because of time zones or
just plain business you can still go and listen to those
office hours recordings and you should be able to get
what you might of otherwise got if you’d just sat on the
office hours call itself and listened. If you’re not sure
 how to sign up or register for office hours, check your
email or your inbox because I sent that out as an email
when you first signed up. Alternatively you can look in
your online view and you should see ways to sign up for
those office hours. But, on with the show! This week we
are going to put aside those content audits and Amazon
reviews, we’ll come back to them, we’re just putting
them aside, and we’re going to talk about four things.

Those four things are:

• UserTesting.com
• Surveying your existing paying customers
• Using pop-up surveys and onsite surveys like
Qualru and Surveydot-I-O and
• Interviewing people

FUN!

After this session we’ll move on from how to do research

and the rest of this, the first phase in this course, we’ll
talk about what to do with all that voice of customer
data that you’ll be getting. So that’s that – let’s get
started! UserTesting.com – what do you do with it?
We’re about to find out…

3:23 Truth be told, I was going to talk to you about

UserTesting.com last week, but it already felt like things
were maybe a bit overwhelming, they could’ve been,
right, if I had added one more thing on to that
introductory week, it might have been a bit much.

But, the reason I wanted to talk about UserTesting.com

last week and why I’m talking about it first this week is
because UserTesting.com and help you figure out what
questions you need to ask your existing customers and
your visitors in the surveys that we are going to about
after this.

So, UserTesting.com of course helps you see what users

are experiencing when they are going through you site,
particularly new users, of course, but along the way
there it can tell you what questions you need to dive
deeper on, or where real problems may be laying, or
where your messaging is falling flat, and when you see
something like that coming through on UserTesting.com,
it can give you a line to follow or a path to follow with
your survey questions, versus just sitting down and
saying ‘what questions should I ask my customers?”
 There are some questions that I do recommend you ask
your customers in your surveys that you do, but there
are other questions that are going to be more specific to
exactly what people are not understanding or
understanding enough on your site, confused by or want
to hear more about. When you do UT sessions you get to
see what stands out as something that you should go
find out more about. So keep that in mind you are going
through your UT experience and watching what people
are saying and reading their feedback.

5:22 Now if you have two monitors, I recommend that you

maybe watch this on one monitor, and put UT up on the
other, or put one on the iPad or whatever device you
want to do whatever it takes to see this video and to
check out UserTesting.com.

Ok I am on UserTesting.com as you can see here,

hopefully, now I’ll be showing screen shots along the
way, I want to help walk you thru your set-up before
your first UT user test. Now as you can see, if this is your
first time you’ve every set-up a UserTesting.com session,
you qualify to save money on it, so that’s a good thing,
that , um , it could bring it down to eighty-seven dollars
to have 3 participants, and three participants may be
enough.

Next, you get to say if you want participants to use their

mobile device or personal computer, and for me and
Tope we chose a personal computer because we are
trying to optimize the website there, rather than a
mobile version of it.

Finally, and this is the important part, you can choose to

start from scratch or to start with a template. Now, I
recommend you start with a template because UT has a
lot of great questions that they’ve already put together
that are really easy just repurpose and tweak. Now,
we’ve modified the most basic, standard questions that
there already were, to come up with about five tasks.
The scenario we set I’ll get into, and then we did have
some special requirements.

So, let me tell you what we did, and then we can try to
see if we can modify that for your business.

7:20 So, this was our scenario: You are a designer, developer
and/or start-up founder and you want to buy an app
interface design or that you can then code or give to
someone to code for you.

Now the reason we chose that scenario is because it is

based on assumptions that we already have based on
what, hoping knows about his audience that its primary
designers developer and start-up founder and you want
to buy an app interface design that you can then give or
that you can then code or give to someone to code for
you. Now the reason we chose that scenario is because it
is based on assumptions that we already have based on
what, toping knows about his audience, that its primarily
designer, developer and start-up founders are going to
say that the reason they were doing was to find an app
interface design that they could then code or give to
someone to code for them.

So, we just took what we knew people were doing – or a

strong assumption of what they were doing – and we put
those and put those into this scenario. Now if you have
no idea, you could do a survey shorter to try to get to
point of understanding what people are on your site to
do, what their scenario typically is. (And of course we’ll
get into surveys right away.)

Here are tabs. Search Google for iPhone app designs.

Click on a couple search results, spending no more than
45 seconds on each site. Explain what you’re learning.
Now the reason we want to do that was because we
knew that people were in a lot of cases looking around
for diff app designs templates, so they weren't
necessarily conscience of the app design brand, they
were just searching and they would find Tope. They
would also finds its competition, so we wanted them to
look at the competitor’s site and then later do a task that
would bring them over to app?

So that’s why our next task was to go to

www.appdesignvault.com. Look at the homepage for
five seconds then look away, but do recall the one thing
that stands out. That’s a really standard user.com
question and it’s really good, it performs great, every
time just to get the quick hit, quick idea, of what people
are noticing. True that there are other sites that can
actually do that for you, Um, and you don’t have to pay
for them in most cases, but that’s just one small part of
what we want to learn, so it’s great to have it included
 here.

9:47 Our third task was, let’s say you’re creating an app. It can
be an app for anything you want. You want to buy an
iPhone app design app interface design that you can
then code or give to someone to develop.

Think aloud about the questions you might have.

Now, put those questions and your objective in mind,

now explore the site. Are your questions answered?
That’s a tough one (laugh) that question expects a lot of
the person who’s completing usertesting.com.

It asks them to think on fly and puts them in a position

their not actually in. That said, we still got some great
results from this, so if you choose to go with something
where you ask them to think aloud about their questions
then that can help you understand what their questions
are so it’s good, hopefully your users will be in a position
where to able to really think through what their
questions are about, and if you use the right special
requirements around this you can try to narrow down
your results so that the only people who are using your
site are people who would have those questions in this
case, developers designers or start-up founders.

11:05 Task four of five was, Would you buy an app design from
this site during this visit? Why or why not? Pretty
straight, pretty obvious question to ask but it’s rarely
that helpful: would you pay for this? Or would you buy
this when people have to put their money, you can learn
a lot that’s why slip testing is so fantastic because
they’re actually voting with their credit cards. Would you
buy something?

There's no barrier to say yes or no for the average

person. If a person is trying to make you feel good
would likely say yes, they’re exceptions of course, but it’s
easy to yes, it’s hard to say no I wouldn’t buy that, so
conditional sort of would you questions are not
necessarily that great, but still pretty useful in this
exercise.

11:56 The fifth task is a great one for us and it goes like this:
Find something you genuinely consider buying, then try
to buy it. Use fake information and then stop before you
 actually purchase. Please don’t use any tools to
automatically fill in the web forms. Talk through the
purchase experience and be real about points where you
would likely drop off or abandon the cart if any such
points exist for you.

So key things to point out there, I mean, this is an

exercise in watching them go through a cart but what I’d
like to point out is that we have, we may be sure to tell
them that they could use that information, that we want
to see them fill in the forms in the cart and we said
please don’t use any tools too auto fill in forms.

In my experience a lot of users actually have little

widgets that they use to fill in forms, which is not very
helpful when you are trying to watch how they are filling
out your forms, or where they’re getting stuck. So, be
sure to ask them to call out, that they should not use any
of those tools.

13:01 So, those were the five tasks. Pretty straightforward. The
average use, I think, took about 20 minutes and that
most cases they really will take 20 minutes. So you ask
three people to do session, one each, you’ve got an hour
of video review and when you’re reviewing it you'll find
um a lot of time just disappears as you’re watching these
amazing notes. So, you can do three UserTesting.com
sessions, expect 20 minutes each and probably expect to
spend an hour on each total when you’re going through
and reviewing.

Finally, we had special requirements of this, and those

went like this: Only accept this assignment if your
developer, programmer, a designer such as digital UI or
UX graphic designer, not print, or a tech start-up
founder. And you might think, well how are they gonna,
what are the chances, they will even have these specific
people on usertesting.com. They have a huge, broad
range of users and its growing all the time, you can get
specific to countries in a lot of cases, but if you don’t
have to get that specific if you don’t need people to be in
the US or UK or India in order to use this and tell you
what their experiences using it, don’t add in limitations
that will keep you from getting the users you need. So
that’s how to get set-up in usertesting.co.

Use the questions that you’ve already got, and then

modify them for your own needs. You don’t have to
 come from scratch, and id also recommend that you
don’t add too many tasks in. The five that I did for
UserTesting .com for app design fall I could’ve done for
might have been better if I had done more, but I don’t
regret it, I got a lot of great data out of there, so , um it
might have been a little simpler for the end user if I’d
had limited it to four.

15:03 Let’s look now at dashboard for once you’ve got user
videos in or once they start coming in. This is the
completed dashboard for App Design Vault. You can see
that we did five user testing sections, um, their all shown
here, and what I’d like to point out is some of the great
features that can help you move through
UserTesting.com faster and get more out of it. If you’re
short on time, whatever it may be.

So, UserTesting.com has added something called the

highlight reels recently, where you can pinpoint in the
videos that are particularly awesome or meaningful and
add those to your highlight reels you can see on the
screen where you go to create that highlight reel. It’s
really a matter of clicking around and doing it yourself
and as you’ll see not too surprisingly everything on
UserTesting.com is pretty user friendly. So, it’s not a pain
in the butt to create that highlight reel.

You can also go through and filter all of the sessions that
you have recorded to see, you know, which ones you
haven’t watched yet, um, and which ones are perhaps if
you had your own customers, go through it and do use
testing session for you, you can do those, um, so there’s
lots of great ways to check through what you received as
data.

Now I’ve clicked through online videos and you can see
here the notes that I’ve made while watching the video,
those are of course, as simple as clicking as you’re going
through watching, you’ll see the side that allows you to
click to make notes throughout the clip that you’re
watching. Now, in the end of all of this, once you’ve got
all of this, through the written answers from people, the
videos of people actually using your site your notes on
that video for each of those people, then you can export
it all quite easily to excel so then for app design vault and
the results are something of course that you can go
through later and we will look more at those later. Or
you can go through them quickly at a glance in your
 spreadsheet. So, as you’re going through the videos that
you’ve received from user, do your best to make notes
that will be helpful to you, um, we all have our own way
of taking notes, so whatever works for you.

I find that short, to the point, notes that I can read

quickly – if I can’t read them quickly I probably won’t
spend a lot of time actually going through and looking at
them (laugh) cause I’m lazy, no, just kidding, I don’t
know, maybe, um, but, but, the notes that are shorter
usually are easier to do something with or decide not to
do anything with. So that said, that is my introduction to
usertesting.com for you and you can go out, do it, ha-ha,
enjoy it, hopefully, and it is actually kind of fun to see
how the use test results come in quite quickly or these
user sessions come in quite quickly, um, and then you
get to start watching one by one which can be a good
way to go about taking in some information so you don’t
store up all five or seven or three that you’re doing, and
then kind of feel overloaded by all the information that
you’re looking at all at once.

18:32 You could take an entire course, an entire semester long,

two semester long university courses on survey design,
how to survey people, more than that people make
entire lives out of surveying people. So, I’m not going to
teach you to be the world’s greatest researcher when it
comes to surveys, that’s not really the point here, there
are a lot of best practices and if you’re very concerned
with them, um, please do a lot of research on it but
that’s not really the goal here.

The goal here is to teach you how to put together a

survey that you can then send to your existing customers
by email to get the best responses you can for your
needs when it comes to writing copy for your homepage.

That said, I’m not just guessing at surveys. I’ve done a lot
of surveys, a lot of them, and completed my own
research projects of course when I was doing my
Master’s, so, I’ve experienced the academic side of
surveying and all the social research and of course the
hands-on practical side of it. To work with some great
people who are very good at this and they’ve taught me
a lot. So, I hope that I can impart some wisdom here to
help you create the right survey that you get your results
to me.
Now when it comes to surveying people, there are a lot
of questions that immediately come up. I’ll try to answer
as many as I can here, but if you have more please bring
them to office hours.

So, the biggest question is where do these questions

come from? Good Q.

How many questions should I be asking? Is there a

maximum, is there a minimum? Should I in send people
to complete a survey if in-send them do I put that in the
front of the survey as an invitation, or do I reward them
in the end without having told them? What happens
there?

These are all really, really, really, solid questions. Where

your questions come from will depend largely on, of
course, your unique situation and what you’re trying to
find out. So, we only want to ask questions that you can
actually use the answers to, and I recommend that you
keep the questions focused on things that you can use to
optimize your home page.

So that means that this isn’t a chance to do product dev

research, or any other such research that you might
want to do. That happens separately. Let’s focus and try
to keep these questions to about 6 - 10 questions that
are fully targeted on what you’re hoping to learn.

Now the question is what are you hoping to learn? The

answer to that question could come from multiple
placed; you may just know. You may already know; this
may not be a problem for you. You may know exactly
what questions you want to ask because you know what
you are trying to learn, you’ve identified that you don’t
know what your value proposition is, you don’t know
what it is to certain audience or you present you don’t
know who your audience is, who those paying customers
really are, you’ve identified that you don’t know where
they're coming from in most cases, your analytics are not
giving you a clear picture and you’re not sure what’s due
to get more people from there so you need to find out
where they’re coming from.

You could have any number of questions already ready,

and I do recommend that with those questions in mind
you start jotting some ideas of what you might want to
ask. Make a long list if it comes naturally to you and then
 edit that , and if it doesn’t come naturally to you, then
use what I’m about to tell, to help bring out some
questions for your survey.

22:48 The reason we just talked about UserTesting.com is

because you should be looking at your UserTesting.com
responses to help drive those questions as I mentioned
in the UserTesting.com video. So your questions could be
coming in large part from UserTesting.com. What did
you learn there? What was revealed to you there? What
are people having problems with? Not in use of your site,
we are going to talk to your visitors separating, what are
they having problems when it comes to understanding g
your product? What don’t you know about the value
that your product really adds? Do you know if it’s a time
thing versus money thing? Do you know what your
target audience ranks most import? Do they shop for
products like yours with price front of mind? What are
their biggest concerns when they’re trying to get to point
of acquiring a solution like yours? What were they doing
before they found you? What was happening in their
lives that brought them to this point? Now going through
UserTesting.com all of those responses can help you put
together a short list of questions. Additionally, these are
the questions I asked App Design Vault. I’ll read them
out and we’ll talk through them. This is also going to be
available in your files for the week.

24:16 First question is a multiple choice question really radio

buttons, it shouldn’t probably in most cases one thing.
Question number two is, when did you realize you
needed a project like ours? What was going on in your
world that caused you to come looking for app designs?
Three, what problem would you say App Design Vault
eliminates or lessens for you? How do you feel?

Number four is a select-all-that-apply question: why did

you chose us? This is where you could list off a lot of
options but always leaving other available because you
can’t necessarily guess everything that’s going in the
mind, or their reasons for choosing you. Listing off
options makes it really easy for them to complete the
fields so you’ll see already that we have a blend of lists
and paragraph text, or lined text, and that’s important.
(We) There are times when we want to see them, to
hear their voice as their giving you a response similar to
what we would do in an interview, and then there are
other times when we just want them to feel that they
 can move quickly. And if we already have some answers,
or some idea of what might have been say their reasons
for choosing us, listing that out rather than asking them
to come up with it can go a long way towards getting
that completion rate up for your survey.

Third question is what three words would you use to

describe the designs you purchased from us? And this is
a really, really great question to ask from a copywriters
perspective. It’s easy for the recipient or the person
who’s completing the survey to say to those three
words, to find them or usually be a list of adjectives or
there could be something like I love this, right, a quick
phrase that isn't necessarily that useful to us, but there
are so many more useful responses that we may get like
a list of adjectives that we can then use, that you don’t
necessarily want to say what three adjectives would you
use to describe the designs you purchased from us.

Um, just using natural language can go a long way so no

ones like, what's an adjective? Ha-ha and also so we just
get their natural feedback rather than necessarily over
raw feedback.

Number six: are you happy with App Design Vault? It’s
really a simple question that we’ve thrown in there
because it can give us a sense for what we’re looking at
in that feedback. Um, and because it’s also another one
that easy to complete. We’ve put it at the end, close to
the end of the survey because if we put it at the
beginning, and their answer was no, it might color the
rest of the survey.

27:16 Number seven, following the question about happiness,

what do we most need to improve on? And this was a
question that is more about a, I mean you can use this to
help with your business, like if customer serve is a
problem, or if the support you offer turns out to be a
problem great, that can help you outside of this
homepage optimization. But, it’s also about seeing what
they’re not checking off.

So, if they’re not checking off, you know , for what do

we most need to improve on, they’re not saying the
quality of our design , we can infer that a quality of
designs is at least ok.

So there’s no red flags there, so if we were to go around

 saying that these were high quality design, then we
wouldn’t have cause to believe that people don’t agree
with that statement. Not that it’s going to shape our
messages but that we can get a sense for whether we’re
kind of off our rocker, or if were not, and we're u know
we understand what’s great with our product and what’s
not. Finally how likely are you to recommend App Design
Vault to others? That one is just a great question, kind of
a “net promoter” question you can put that in there. It’s
nice to finish off with a question like that, um, if only to
bring them closer to your brand. You already got a lot of
great information out of them in the survey, so it’s nice
to tie it off with a sense of goodwill.

28:46 And speaking of goodwill, let’s talk about the thank you
msg. So for app design vault we decided that we weren’t
going to incent people off with that we didn’t want them
to complete the survey because they wanted to get
whatever you’re using to incent them. We decided
instead to just ask people to take the survey, and then at
the end of it, for those who completed we were going to
delight them with a discount code. So that’s, that’s what
we did, as you can see, we said in our thank you message
now that you’ve taken the time to help me I’m going to
use your feedback to improve and I’d like to offer you a
35% discount on any app on AppDesignVault.com. Great,
right, here’s the coupon code, thank you signed with the
person who’s name their most likely to know, in this case
Tope's name, again, I’m so sure I’m saying his name
wrong! Ahhh!! (laughing)

29:44 Now when we go through and take everything we’re

learning from all of this voice of customer data, that
we're gathering, when we put that in our report you'll
see what these questions are really there to teach us. In
the meantime, I hope that the ahh, editorializing that I
did that we went through and discusses or kind of this
narrator sort of perspective, um will help you
understand what questions to ask and why you should
ask them. Keep in mind that we want to keep the survey
short, to the point, not too short, we want to make sure
that were getting something out of this because we
don’t want to have to survey people necessarily again
simply because we failed to ask the right questions.

30:34 Finally let’s talk about tools you may want to use to send
out the survey. For App Design Vault, we used Survey
 Monkey; you could use any survey tool you wanted to
but Survey Monkey is really good for collecting and
analyzing the data. So, it’s kind of a no brainer to use
Survey Monkey, but I’ve also used Fluid Surveys and that
has turned out to be okay they have some pretty good
tools for advanced questions if you do have more
advanced questions, like ratings, scales and things like
that. Fluid Surveys is a little pricier I’ve found, but you’re
only going to be signing up for the period that you need
to do the survey or so about a month, anyway. I hope
that isn’t a bad way to look at subscription model that
these companies have, but I think we all know that’s
what you do, so if you sign up for anything, whether its
Survey Monkey or Fluid Surveys, you’re really just
committing for that month.

31:36 A radio button, or multiple choice? For those response

that could include nothing I’m just browsing, um, I’m
looking for an app design vault case, app design
template, things like that – those quick little questions,
you don’t have to have a lot of options for them, either.
Including another can be good, if you can do that. Now
other questions could include, have you heard of us
before arriving here today? That’s a yes/no answer, and
that’s easy for the end user to complete and for you to
get an understanding of how aware people are aware
when they’re arriving on your site.

Awareness is such a big part of helping to covert people.

Depending on a person’s stage or state of awareness,

you’ll have to do a certain amount of work to get them
either to know more about you or to reinforce what they
know about you, or not say anything at all about those
things because they’re quite aware of you. So knowing
that they are aware of you or not aware of you can be a
great thing.

34:51 Of course asking if people are or not aware can mean it

might be hard for someone to answer no so you may get
a lot of kind of false yes’s, so if you want to do more of a
scale, then you can do something like, how much did you
know about us before you arrived here today. And then
have never heard of you to I’m a total fan, right, and
everything in between there. So that could be a good
way to get a clearer understanding of where people are
when they are arriving on your site.
35:30 Now let’s talk about survey questions for your visitors.
Again if you use Survey.io, great, the questions are
already built in, and that’s fine, they're good questions
you can go ask those. For App Design Vault, we wanted
to ask some different questions so we went about doing
our own survey that Tope set up. And those questions
are in your files from the week, and I’ll also talk briefly
through them now.

So one of the big questions we had that we wanted to

get an answer to was what brought you here today? And
as you’ll see with these questions most of them are
multiple choice questions. Visitors aren’t nearly as
invested in our brand or our company as paying
customers, so when we're surveying paying customers
we may be able to ask for more detailed responses (than
when we’re surveying visitors). When we're surveying
people who aren’t even sure exactly who we are and
why they’re filling this in, um, we should do our best to
keep their responses crisp so they can move quickly
through the survey.

36:36 So what brought you here today? This was great for us to
know if a lot of people were coming from deals sites; the
reason we want to know that for App Design Vault was
because that could really have a lot to do with a lower
conversion rate. So we could’ve been going into this
conversion optimization project saying, well, let’s
increase the conversion rate but then we learned that
people were coming from App Sumo, Mighty Deals or
Stack Social, where the templates are already
discounted, where they were going to complete the
transaction and they were just coming here to learn if
App Design Vault was credible, to see if it looks like
something that they want to spend money on in the first
place, then trying to convert those people who are
already buying over another site would be a really, really
big challenge. So we want to know if in fact, everybody
was coming from App Sumo or not.

37:32 Number two is, what did you come here hoping to find?
And then we give them an example to help them
complete this question. So, that’s where our example is,
I want to learn about your company before I buy or I’m
looking for apps with sample code.

Question three, which of these best describes you? That

can help us again to understand if we have a lot of
 paying customers who are, let's say, developers, we find
out – what if a lot of our visitors are in fact from a digital
marketing or ad agency? Should we then be doing more
to help convert those people?

So we might compare that question to any question that

we have in the survey for paying customers around
which group they most identify with.

If that is a question that you wanted to ask, that could be

very useful to do.

Now we wanted to get into questions with responses

that will allow us to start to create a messaging
hierarchy. To really understand the top most things that
people are looking for. Whether this would make it onto
the homepage or on to say the gallery page or deeper
into the product page, that was TBD, but nonetheless it
was useful information for us to try to gather from
visitors.

There are just two questions left after that as you can
see these are actually quite short and easy to complete.
So although we anticipated 60 seconds to complete, that
was kind of, um, saturated really were adding a lot of
padding there. You can surely complete this survey quite
quickly which is good for those visitors.

39:09 Question five: What one thing do you think we should

improve on our website? And we've put in a bunch of
like, a silly sort of answer - you need to use purple my
favourite color more often on this site, and we did that
silly sort of answer because I didn’t want to be leading
with the example, I didn’t want to plant an idea that
already might have been there. I wanted them to know
what an example might look like but not too start
actually oh yeah, that’s what I want.

If we had said, for example, show the template earlier

on, like on the homepage, we would be likely to get
responses that would be similar to that example which
would make it not very useful question for us. And the
sixth question pretty straight forward - are you planning
to purchase from App Design Vault today, Yes from the
website, No and Other. And in the case of Other that was
more along those lines of will they be purchasing on App
Sumo or Mighty Deals or Stack Social?
 So those were the questions, and we’ve finished with the
same thank you that we offered to paying customers,
which is good in that it makes people feel really good to
get that surprise, and also it can help convert them get a
few more sales even if they are at a 30% discount.

40:29 So it’s time to interview some of your customers.

The idea is exciting maybe in a little scary too, but what’s

the reality of it. Now, what should you expect to
happen?

Well, let’s start by discussing the ways that you can

conduct an interview. The goal is to conduct a one on
one or one to one rather than a group interview or
something that feels a bit more like a focus or less
personal. The three key ways that you can conduct an
interview that I’m going to recommend here are either in
person, across the table from each other or across chairs
from each other, um, on Skype, using video chat, or
phone. The way I did the interviews for app design vault
they were all done all the phone so I can’t help but
recommend phone interviews because actually every
client interview I’ve ever done or interview on behalf of
a client has been done on the phone. And it seems to
work pretty well. And most of my recommendations will
be based on my experiences doing phone interviews.

I recommend you do three to five interviews and that

you do them with people who fit into these groups:
Leads or prospects which could be a visitor to your site,
or another client that is considering coming on board
with you, existing customers those could be paying
customers, pre-trial customers, or free product
customers that maybe one day will convert to paid
whatever it might be. And the other group is past
customers or people who you’ve lost somehow, those
are also worth interviewing. So if you were to do an
interview with one person from those three groups,
you’d have three interviews. If you do about 5
interviews, I’d recommend that you spend a lot of that
interview time or you do two to three interviews with
the second group, which is your existing customers. You
could learn a lot from leads, and can learn a lot from
past customers but I have often found that the best
people to learn from are those who are already open to
your brand.
 Regardless of the way you choose to interview, whether
in person, on the phone or on Skype, you should go into
your interview with this in mind: I’m going to listen. Tell
yourself that as often as you need to for you to believe
and actually do it. You’re not going into an interview to
just chat or to say what you think or any of that kind of
stuff. What you’re really doing is listening and you’re
asking the small questions along the way that give you
more things to listen to and give them more to say
obviously. So, you’re not trying to fill in a questionnaire.

We’re gonna talk about questions right away, but it’s not
about going, sitting down and listing question A answer
please question B, answer please. It’s not gonna be like
that at all. This isn’t a survey, it’s not a poll, it’s not a
questionnaire. It’s an interview.

43:49 To get the most out of the interview, I recommend that

you avoid taking detail notes. You may have a notepad
that you jot things down on, but I recommend that
instead you use a recording device to record the
conversation so you can listen back to it later. Think also
of the setting. I know these sound maybe like, they’re a
bit like, ok Joanna get to the questions, but no this is all
critical in getting the best things that we can out of the
people we're interviewing. So if you think of the setting
that can help you ensure that people are in the right
environment to open up to you, and connect with you
and tell you the things that you need them to tell you.
That means that if you do an in-person interview, do it in
a calm space where you can relax, you can exchange a
few pleasantries, right, and get comfortable with each
other, um, rather than say, a loud coffee shop, where
you have to like kind of shout at the other person or you
feel like you’re being watched sometimes. If you’re doing
it on Skype or over the phone you can ask the person in
advance if they could make sure that they are in a room
where there are no other people and they can close the
door and even put you on speaker phone if you’re on the
phone. That way they get to sit at a table, sit in a chair
that’s comfortable, lean back, and tell you things and
open up to you. That’s what you want from people.

45:24 Now we also talk briefly how to actually get to the

interview. How do you get people to agree to be
interviewed by you?

Usually it’s a matter of reaching out to people who have

already reached out to you before. So most of us will
have people who are writing us thanks this is cool,
whatever it may be, use emails that you get and you file
away and hopefully to responds to then file away. For
past customers that’s perhaps a little trickier but again
it’s a matter of just sending them an email saying hey, I
really would like to talk to you, it would be great to hear
your thoughts on your experience using my product. You
don’t have to go into a lot of detail in this email where
you're requesting an interview, but I would recommend
that you make it sound pretty simple and casual.

Also in this email that you send to them where you invite
them, make sure you set expectations for how long this
interview is going to take. It’s not a great idea to go into
an interview with a person saying, oh I’ve got about 20
minutes. Ugh, 20 minutes is not enough time. You’re
going to need 45-60 minutes for most interviews
because although you can get through some of the top
level stuff in 20 min, we don’t just want the top level
stuff – we want what’s below it. That’s where all the
great stories are the great feelings are. That’s what we’re
going for in an interview. You could survey someone and
get the things that you would get in those first 20 min
the top level stuff; we’re interviewing not just as an
alternative to a survey, but because it gives you those
deeper insights that a survey can’t give you.

So be sure to ask the person to set aside 45-60 minutes

to chat openly with you about it.

Let them know that no one else is going to see their

recording or if someone else is, let them know who that
person is, and that you’ll keep everything confidential.

Now let’s say you’ve lined up the interviews, you’re

ready to go into them, the person has arrived on the
phone or wherever it may be, you’re ready to do this,
you have your recording device handy. What happens
now?

For best results I recommend you start a brief period of

rapport building. So you’re just going to talk casually
about what their day has been like, what’s been going
on; you’re gonna listen to what they say and not sound
like you’re trying to scoot ahead to take care of the
business to take care of. This call is about the person, or
this interview, obviously it’s an interview, is about the
 other person and their experiences. You respect those,
you want to hear it, and that’s why you’re happy to
listen to the things they say in the beginning of the
conversation, whatever that might be. And to share with
them. So that you can build this rapport and create these
connections that you’ll need in order to get the most out
of this interview.

48:25 What kind of questions should you go in with? Excellent

question. This is the one that most of us ask. I
recommend that you have a few questions handy, a few
questions that you all use to help direct the
conversation. But don’t think of this as a Q & A; this is a
conversation where you’ll be doing a lot of listening and
they’ll be doing about 95, ha-ha 95, 85 - 90% of the
talking.

So the questions you go into the interview with should

be conversational questions, not questions you’ll throw
out as they are and ask for direct response to. Does that
make sense? These basic questions that you might
wanna go in with could include questions about their
background, who they, where they’re from what
business they’re from. That should come pretty
naturally. But it can help you just to have those written
down, so you start your interview off on the right foot,
rather than searching your head, ha-ha, for what
questions to ask this person who's sitting there waiting
for you to direct the interview.

It’s a little intimidating, where it can be, if you think oh

no, I don’t know what questions to ask. So, questions
about the person, then we can get into some questions
about their use of the product, what it feels like for
them, what they’ve done with it so far, how has that felt
for them, ya know all of that kind of stuff. Around the
product, the value they’re able to drive from it what’ve
they been experiencing with it? What’s the time that
they’ve used it recently and what did it do for them?
How did that feel? What are those problems also that
lead them to want to use your solution or to seek out
your solution? Who was it that first turned them on to
you, or did they do a search, and what were they
thinking when they were doing this search, if they can
recall? And it’s okay if they can’t, obviously. They
shouldn’t be creating answers for you.

50:29 You can also ask them questions or be prepared to ask

 them questions that speak to their biggest challenges. In
their home life, in their work life, or whatever life you
think is most relevant to discuss.

You could ask about other solutions they’ve used, if you

know that they’ve switched from another solution or
that they’ve switched form you to another solution.
What was happening there? What was the need that
they were feeling, what was going on in their lives that
made them make that transition, and how did they feel
as they made the transition?

Let them tell you about those feelings. Feelings are going
to be a big part of the interview process. Most of the
questions you’ll ask will include words like feel, those will
be the questions that will get closer to deeper insight,
and those are the more probing questions. So, as you ask
these questions, think of their barriers and their drivers.
Start visualizing. If you, if you’re making notes, you might
want to mark on one column what sounds like a barrier,
or what’s a problem for them, or why they haven’t been
able to do X Y or Z or what they were looking, or what
their pains were. Those might go on one column as a
simple jotted down note, if you’re making simple notes.

Then you could do their drivers or their delighters on the

other side. So if they’re saying things that they LOVE in
life, or that they LOVE about solutions like yours, or they
love about their job, those can all go down under drivers
and delights. You could do that bit of note taking and
those could help you once you see those words down of
page those can help you with some probing questions.

(There’s a simple worksheet for this in the course.)

52:16 So probing questions are really questions where you take

something that the person said, and you push for more
in a gentle pushing way, where you sound more like a
listener and someone who is curious to know more, than
you do sound like someone who’s probing. We don’t
want to be guilty of probing; we just want to get the
results of gently probing. I keep saying probing. So if
someone says to you that before they found your
solution they had a lot of anxiety around how to manage
their documents – that all these legal documents, all
these real estate documents for their personal life, and
they had other things for their work life, a lot of
documents in lots of different place, let’s say, let’s say,
because this is a solution I’ve pulled out of the air...ha-
ha…so if they say that they’re anxious, they’ve told you
how that made them feel, what could you do then, to
probe further?

You could say something like, so you mentioned that you

had a lot of anxiety (pause) around (pause) organizing
your (pause) life.

And then if they don’t jump in there – cause you’re

actually intentionally going slowly and thoughtfully – if
they don’t jump in there to explain more, then you say,
(long pause) can you tell me more about that? I’d like to
hear more about that I’d like to understand that?

And wait for them to respond.

That’s the probing question, um which might sound, ha-

ha, silly and the first times you do it you might feel silly
about it, but don’t. Cause it’s what you’re supposed to
do, so you’re doing it right.

Other questions that you might ask to keep the

conversation flowing and keep them telling you more,
are questions like, how did that make you feel or how
did that feel? Or can you tell me what that was like for
you, or what do you believe was really going on there?
And (pause), why do you feel that might be? Or, can you
help me understand what that was like?

Those sound silly, but those are all great. Write them
down, and use them in your interview. It will help people
get to that deeper point.

Now if they’re are not getting to that deeper point, it

could be because that rapport hasn’t been established
yet, or they could just need a little more time to open up
to you. So, if they’re kind of blocking all those attempts
to get inside their heads and their hearts, then pull back
and maybe switch topics a bit, change up to something
else, but be sure to go back if you can; we want to get to
the answers around how X made them feel.

You could also use hanging sentences. So a hanging

sentence is when you start saying something and you
trail off, like, like that teacher on that show, on Ferris
Bueller right, when he leads people and they’re
supposed to fill in the rest of the sentence but they
 don’t. A hanging sentence example is: you were telling
me about the first time you used the product..... (Pause)
and...... (Pause, tilt head)? That’s it! Ha-ha and that’s
where you wait for them to complete it. You could also
repeat to them what they said and ask them to tell you
more, like: you’d mentioned the first time you used the
product, you had a hard time signing in, and so you went
away, can you tell me more about that?

Right, so we’re really trying to move from these facts

that they’re sharing with you, to the deeper story
beneath those facts.

56:27 Now let’s talk about keeping people on topic.

You will find that people often go off on a bit of a

tangent, they’ll get stuck on some idea. I interviewed
someone once who was an absolute Apple fan boy and
he could say nothing but amazing things about Apple,
and I wasn’t interviewing him about Apple. But it was
like, this endless discussion he told me about how he
visited Steve Jobs's home, and, and waited at his door or
something, ha-ha, and I was like, it was very hard for me
to get out of him that; it was really odd. It can be hard to
get out of those tangential moments. So how do you do
it?

Okay, it takes practice. All interviewing takes practice;

you could spend your entire life practicing interviewing.
Always a little different because you’re dealing with
people and people respond differently to different
things, as we know. But let’s say you’re interviewing
someone about their experience using your app. They
are off on a tangent about how “whenever they
download apps, from the App Store, they get all these
weird user reviews that they have a hard time reading
and when they left you a review once, their user name
was already taken, so they had to go and create a new
user name, and when they created the new user name
the review they just written disappeared so they had to
start again, so the review got really short and they got
annoyed before it was all over… blah.”

This long tangent has nothing to do with their experience

using your app; it has everything to do with their
experience using the App Store and in particular reviews
on the App Store. But nothing to do with your app. So,
what could you do to bring them back where you need
them to be? You could simply do it. Just say, Ah, that’s
interesting, yea, I can definitely understand how that
might fell to deal with those reviews, now, when we’re
thinking about this app itself, can you tell me how it
makes you feel when it’s up to you to share your app
content with your friends? What’s that like for you?

They’ll know that we’re no longer talking about user

reviews, but if they go back, and still talk more about
user reviews, um, you might just have to let them finish
airing, ya know, their grief, but in most cases, they’ll
know that you’ve switched, and be okay with the way
that you’ve switched, cause you didn’t say, oh that’s
cool, can we get back on topic, or anything like that.
You’re listening. You get it. You’ve shown that you
understand. You’ve been there. You haven’t spent so
much time on that they now think you’re having a
conversation about your mutual dislike for user reviews.
Don’t spend too much time on it – and don’t pause at
the end of the period. So if you’d said, I can understand
what it would be like to be so frustrated by user reviews,
and you leave that gap before you say, now can we talk,
now how does this... If you leave that gap, they think
that’s time for them to get back in there, cause they’re
passionate about it, they want to keep talking about it.
Say, I can understand how it might feel to deal with
those user reviews now when we’re talking about.....
Right, no pause, no pause but you’re not rattling on
either.

Finally if you quick tipsters are always lots to say about

interviews so there’s more and more that we can get
into but let’s do few quick tips: Try to match their energy
level. It’s usually good to stay calm and to keep your
voice sort of low and soothing, not lulling, we don’t want
to put them to sleep necessarily, ha-ha, but lowww and
caaalm, with few ups and downs, things like that. If
they’re calm great; if they’re hyper you can try to reach
up a bit to match it, but in matching them do your best
to work them down to where you are in this calm zone.
Don’t be judgemental during it. You can find yourself
agreeing with the person but you may not want to
include your voice too much in the experience. Show you
understand; say things like hmmm, okay I hear that, I
understand, but don’t say ohhh I know, I’ve totally been
there, cause now you’re more likely to lead them to
really focus on that point rather than to be honest about
what they’ve been going through. Don’t fill empty gaps.
 Don’t feel that silence means we have to fill this in. Know
that you’re in control in this conversation and you’re
allowed to take as much time as is necessary to let the
person finish talking, to let them do any extra talking
they need to do, and for you to get your questions
together and your next thought together.

Listen actively, I think that goes without saying. You’re

here to listen, listen actively, and make sure they know
that you’re listening. If you’re on the phone this is going
to take little hmmm hmmm, without being too
interruptive with those mm-hmms, but make sure that
they know you’re still with them.

Don’t ask leading questions. Don’t try to lead them to a

place you want them to get to. Directing questions is one
thing and directing the topic, but leading them to tell you
something that may not be 100% authentic for them is
obviously not a good thing.

Let them tell stories. Stories are great, analogies are

great, actual experiences they’ve had are great – that’s
really good for helping to build out this picture of what
your average user might be going through.

And finally this is a great tip. I’ve learned a bunch of

these from the brilliant people at HFI. When I’ve taken
their courses, this question comes out loud and clear in
all of their sessions, so I hope that you’ll understand too
that, at the end of the session, the person that you’ve
interviewed should feel better about things than when
they went into this session.

That’s your burden as an interviewer.

One, you’re getting information out of them, but two,

you want them to feel good about the experience, about
you and about themselves.

1:03 So, that does it for the week. Can you believe it? We
Your covered User Testing.com, surveying paying customers,
Homework on-site surveys for your visitors and interviews. All of the
above covered off this week.

It’s a lot. You may want to watch this again or you may
want to watch it as you’re doing each of these individual
tactics, and that brings me to this week’s assignment:
  If you have customers: Set up and launch 3
UserTesting.com sessions.

Review their feedback. Set up and hold at least 3

interviews.

 If you don’t have customers: Use

UserTesting.com to audit your competitor’s
sites. Review their feedback. Try interviewing 3
of your prospects with a focus on their pains and
goals.