The interview phase involves: Prepping the venue Participant payments, café etiquette, and tipping Conducting the interviews Taking succinct notes Analysis phase (two to four hours) The analysis phase is the least complicated of the three phases but is still essential. Don’t get sloppy on this phase, because you need to aggregate the data captured during the interviews, debrief team members who sat in on the interviews, get the client’s feedback if the clients was present, synthesize all of these inputs quickly, and ultimately decide if the interviews were effective in getting the right kind of evidence. The last step is making decisions on the best way to move forward based on your analysis. Planning Phase (One to Two Weeks) Step 1: Determine the objectives In this first phase, you need to establish the objectives of the research study and define which aspects of the value proposition and UX was being examined. Ask yourself, “What is the most important thing I need to learn to determine if this product really has any purpose, marketability, and viability?” What this means is that you need to ask what is the riskiest assumption(s) still on the table at this point in your process. In the case of the software engineer, the value proposition was still up in the air. If I use the formula introduced in Chapter 3, I can tell you that the value proposition before the guerrilla user research was basically Hotels.com for people seeking treatment for their loved ones. The software engineer’s interface provided a matching system similar to Hotels.com, in which users enter a price that they want to pay. The system then offers matches in the specified price range. As in Hotels.com, the name of the rehabilitation center would be withheld until after the user booked it. A big concern was that my team didn’t know if this reverse-auction business model was desirable for that user segment. Because the business model was innately tied to the UX, this uncertainty paralyzed our ability to make any other decisions about the product. We could not move forward until we could determine the success or failure of the value proposition. This also meant that we had to decide as a team along with the