1. Introduction
“Thank you for meeting with us today. We want to understand your current workflow and challenges to build something that truly helps professors and the TAs. We’ll be recording for our notes and may ask follow-up questions about specific experiences”.
“What goals is your current solution (spreadsheet) supposed to solve? What problem does it address?”
2. About the Spreadsheet:
“Could you walk us through how the spreadsheet is typically updated? What triggers an update?”
“What specific information do TAs need to manually update most frequently?”
“When was the last time you encountered data conflicts or errors in the spreadsheet? What caused them?”
3. TA Workload:
“You mentioned ‘mindless work’ for TAs. Could you give us a recent example of a task that felt particularly repetitive or time-consuming?”
“Approximately how many hours per week do TAs spend on spreadsheet maintenance versus actual student support?”
“What happens when a TA forgets to update the spreadsheet? How does this impact the course flow?”
4. Missing Features:
“Tell us about a specific situation where not having individual student scores readily available caused a problem. What was the workaround?”
“Besides individual scores, what other information do you wish you could see at a glance but currently can’t?”
5. Core Needs:
“If we could solve only three problems with a new system, which ones would make the biggest difference to you?”
“What does the spreadsheet do well that we should definitely keep in the new system?”
“How would you know this new system is successful after one semester of use? What metrics would matter?”
6. Practical Considerations:
“Who needs access to this system, and what different permissions would they need?”
“Are there any existing systems (like Moodle) that this would need to integrate with?”
7. Conclusion
“Is there anything we haven’t asked about that would be important for us to know?”
“Would it be possible to get view access to an anonymized version of the current spreadsheet?”
“Thank you for your time.”