What your clients experience
Everything in this chapter happens on your client’s phone, without you in the room. It’s worth reading before you send the first link, because what they see is what you get back.
The link is the whole login
Your client taps the link you sent. The welcome screen opens with your name and theirs, and one Begin button. There is no account to create and no password to enter.
What they’re told before they begin
Below the welcome, a short “Before you start” note sets expectations: roughly how long it takes, that they can pause and resume, and that what they share stays with your project team.
An open question
Most questions are open text. “What does home need to give you that it doesn’t today?” They answer in their own words, the header counts their answers and the things we learned, and this is where the material comes from.
A single choice
A single-select question offers a short list of tappable options, an Other field to type into, and a quiet way past it. An answer given reluctantly is worse than none, because you can’t see the reluctance later.
Several choices
A multi-select question lets a client choose more than one option, for when more than one thing can be true at once.
A scale
A slider question is for a matter of degree. It shows a five-point scale with labelled points, so a client can say how much something matters rather than whether it does.
What to tell them when you send it
At the end, a note confirms their answers are with you and that follow-up questions are normal. Almost everything else is already on the page they land on, so your message only has to carry the part the page cannot: ask them to answer honestly.
Not the logistics
How long it takes and that they can stop are already on the page they land on. Saying them again makes the interview sound longer than it is.
The honest part, yourself
The answers a design can rest on are the ones that were not tidied up first, and nothing on the page asks for that. This is the line worth writing in your own words.
Then leave it alone
It finishes cleanly without you. A follow-up question from you a week later reads as normal rather than as something having gone wrong.
Why you’re not in the room
All 12 partsAn interview you conduct is one your client performs for you. They round things off, they say what sounds reasonable to an architect. On their own time, with nobody waiting, people say what they mean, and you get their words rather than your notes on them.