DrunkenBlog

RM: Question about the interviews

It's a bit of an odd question but I was just wondering about how you conduct your interviews; whilst interviews with regular media are conducted in person, was this the manner in which your one with Wil was held or did you conduct it via another means i.e. instant messenging, email, phone etc...

Also, do you have any advice for a would-be interviewer?

Cheers,
ifelse

It's not that odd of a question, I get a few of these after every interview I birth out onto the web. Unfortunately, it's also one of those questions that is open ended, and is just a no-no to get me started on, yet fortunately its something I've talked about before in a few places.

You might have to hunt a bit through them, perhaps doing a type-ahead-find for the word interview, but the answers to your questions should be within these links:

• Rumble young man, rumble

• RSS for Mac OS X Roundtable (Redux)

• Under the Iron

That last one is an interview I gave awhile back on another site, and be warned I don't think a lot of people got the joke or correlation between the questions and the length, but I do thread through a lot about the interviews, or rather some advice and things I've picked up while doing them.

Aside from what is in those, where you are going to have to infer a bit in a few, and if you're really interested in what I have to say or how they're put together its all there, there are a few more I can chuck in that are good to keep in mind, or at least have helped me...

• The interview is about them. They're the star and the focus, your job is to fade into the background and guide things along.

• Ask yourself what your overriding goal is for the interview, why you are doing it, and what makes the person you're interviewing different.

• Try to shy away from questions you, or your audience, can easily guess the answers to. You have to go there sometimes, but try to phrase it in a way that increases your chances of getting something different or incorporates something from their unique frame of reference.

  I.E., asking Steve Jobs what makes the iPod so popular would be boring, or at least has a high likelihood of getting a canned answer. Asking Steve Jobs what he looks for in trying to create a popular product has a higher chance of shaking loose something interesting.

• Get what is not going to be acceptable off the table before the interview so you aren't spinning in circles during it, but don't treat it as a blank check to go after the person either.

• Ask yourself who your audience is, and what they know, and take it into account.

• There's a school of thought in music called "don't change, evolve", which is often applicable to design, and is applicable here. The idea in that realm is that if you put out an album and its successful, and then get a big head and follow your artistic instincts towards something completely different, you'll lose your fanbase and unless you are really lucky, probably won't get many new ones.

  However, if you keep the same sound over and over, you will generally run yourself into the ground after a few albums. If you look at someone like Aerosmith, their last album sounds very similar to their second-to-last, but is markedly different from their first or second album, yet they're still successful. The key there is small evolutions from album to album, not giant changes.

  This is a strange way to get at my point, but something similar applies here. Ask your audience to evolve a little, but not to change. Asking someone to stretch their brain a bit about things they normally don't follow is one thing, but don't go beating them over the head with things there is no way they'll get without an hour of extra googling, or will take them wildly outside of their comfort zone.

  Since this can get confusing, I'd refer you to the Red Shed chat, which is way off the star-trek-tech-banter-meter for most people, even a lot of my audience, which I consider to be very diverse yet into tech and how it affects us. I love that interview for a few reasons, but the applicable one here is how many people were able to come away with a better understanding of things they'd normally never, ever be exposed to.

  I won't beat you over the head with where I'm going here, but a line from the comedian Dennis Miller comes into play, where he says "People don't have to get everything in my jokes, just enough." Scroll through the interview and ask yourself why you feel like you're "getting enough" and want to keep going, and you should get this. Alternately, if you don't feel like you are, ask yourself why you aren't also.

• At the core, an interview is just asking a question and getting an answer. Asking the right questions is the hard part, and there are a lot of tricks to this, and as it turns out there are a ton of books out there designed to help you learn how to put people at ease and how to phrase questions to draw a person out or get what they're after.

  You're not going to find "How to be a talk show host" on the shelf, but you'll find a wealth of tips in something about how to conduct job interviews for professional positions.

• Many questions can be treated as a starting point, rather than an absolute.

• Depending on what you take into account from above, be prepared for the amount of time you'll have to devote for it. Overestimate by about 200%, and at the end you'll find you've underestimated. However, above all else, try to put as much of the time burden onto you, and not your subject.

• Watch Charlie Rose on PBS, and takes mental notes on everything.

Now, anyone can throw together a list of questions to ask someone, and while you can keep in mind some of the suggestions above, there are intangible things like flow which you often either get or don't get, much like design.

It doesn't mean there aren't tricks to them you can't learn, much like how a designer may just know what colors won't clash yet you aren't screwed if you don't -- you can use a color wheel or something if you are clueless and end up with a decent scheme -- but its 1 AM on a Saturday and we'd be here all night and I'm already feeling pompous enough.

Also, please remember:

• There are different types of interviews, depending on your goals. You might compare it to a Pixar versus Dreamworks situation, where one spends insane amounts of time on one feature while the other puts less into each but produces more, which would be quality versus quantity.

  Another might be sitting down to a big steak dinner, where you talk about one thing, versus sitting down and nibbling on a bunch of different dishes or dumplings. You'll come away full from both, and both have merits.

• What I do is a little different from what most do, and it isn't for everyone and not to everyone's liking. There's generally a method to my madness in the interviews, but sometimes that method doesn't present itself until the end, and not everyone gets to the end.

• Take it all with a grain of salt, because what I've said may change tomorrow. I love that people dig some of what I do, because I put a lot of work into them, but I haven't exactly interviewed 100 people and am still trying to evolve and see what works and doesn't while trying new things. If you go back through some of the older ones, you can probably see how things have changed, and there may be something helpful in doing that also.

And, at the end of the day, there is probably no substitute for chucking everything I've just said and just rolling up your sleeves and going for it, which I hope you do so.

[note:] As ifelse probably noticed, I've started editing these messages a bit to snip out some of the standard "Hey, I have been reading and love..." It bothers me some to do it, because once you start snipping its fair to wonder exactly what else got snipped, but it bothers me more to be throwing praise in front of your eyeballs all the time.

Of course, don't stop including it in the emails, they make lovely additions to the shrine, just don't be surprised if the overly gushing stuff gets snipped. :)

 Posted by drunkenbatman
    July 24, 2005, at 01:17 AM