CustDevs and Finding Respondents on International Markets: Hints’ Secret Practices

Going international has been the top research query with CIS companies for over a year now. We see that with our clients at Hints, and within the industry in general.?

In this article, we will tell you how to find respondents and conduct interviews on international markets. This is relevant to those who decided to go international and is already making the first steps.

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When entering a new market, a company takes multiple factors into account: from market volume to tax laws, from competition levels to the efficiency of advertising channels.?

From the point of view of the demand, there are two fundamental cornerstone questions.?

• Is there demand for my product and is it declining?
• If there is demand, what do people expect from such a product?

It is relatively easy to answer the first question: you calculate the market volume, look at search queries, estimate the number and size of competitors. If there is demand and the competitors show activity and sell something, your product will probably be in demand.?

The second question seems to be quite straightforward, too. You conduct interviews and find out. But it’s not that simple. One should conduct interviews in Russia in Russian, in Brazil in Portuguese, and in Vietnam — in Vietnamese. These tasks are very different in terms of complexity.

In reality, interviewing potential clients, experts, and competitors’ employees gives you endless insights! This allows you to find out what your target audience truly needs (and what product they need), what the alternatives solutions are (who the competitors are), what their advantages/disadvantages are (and what your unique selling point is), how clients search and decide to buy (and how to work on sales and marketing).

Today, I will share our experience of conducting interviews on foreign markets: how we look for UX specialists and respondents, and what are the nuances of international interviews.

Step 1. Looking for a UX specialist

Let's start with the terminology. A UX specialist is a person in charge of preparing the interview method and script, looking for respondents, conducting the interviews, and drawing the final conclusions.

Which specialist will suit me? Defining criteria

Finding a UX? researcher is the first, most difficult and most important step. Before you start looking for one, you define the criteria for them to comply with. Starting with the obvious:?

• They should have experience in UX research. Preferably, in your field, but it will take a long time to find one.?
• They should know how to find respondents.
• Their Russian/English should be fluent enough for them to be able to transcribe interviews and communicate with the team.
• Your interviewer should be very responsible and self-organized.

Now that we've dealt with the obvious, let's look at a few controversial parameters that should be considered.

The first one is the specialist’s place of residence. You can find a person in Russia who moved here from the country you are interested in, say, from Vietnam. You can find a person in Vietnam who speaks Russian or English.?

• A Russian resident has the advantage of speaking Russian, being relatively easy to find, and, possibly, being in the same time zone as you.
• A Vietnamese resident has the advantage of being more familiar with local specifics, having a wider range of candidates to choose from, and being in the same time zone as the respondents.

A general recommendation: try to find the person who has lived in your country of interest for a long time (5+ years). In most fields, the current context of the country’s development is one of the main factors defining the demand. Besides, it is crucial for the specialist to understand the local mentality (how to motivate the respondent to take the interview, which questions must definitely be asked, how to speak in general).?

The second controversial parameter is the cost. The simplest format of reimbursement is payment by interview. This includes coming up with the questions, recruiting, setting up the interview, conducting it, transcribing it, and drawing conclusions from all the interviews.

The total cost depends on the complexity of the respondent’s profile, the researcher’s experience, country of residence, on how busy the specialist is, and on how good you are at negotiating. So prices may vary a lot: from 3,000 to 50,000 rubles per interview.

A general recommendation: think less about the price. The interviews account for a minuscule share of your expenses when entering a new market but they are one of the most important stages in this process.?

Finally, the third parameter is the qualification. You need a good specialist, you know that. But the notion of ‘good’ is a little bit wider for the international market. When interviewing a candidate you would want to learn about:

• The peculiarities of the country you are interested in. If the candidate says something along the lines of ‘it is crucial to ask <…> because <…>’, that is a good sign.
• The peculiarities of your market in the country of interest. You are unlikely to find an expert in the niche, but they should know something about the market.
• Their approach to recruiting. We understand that if we want to find respondents among marketing specialists in Russia we should look on Telegram, and if we need middle-aged women who like cooking, we go on VK or Odnoklassniki. Where do we find such people in the country X? The candidate must have the answer.?
• Translating the interviews. The easiest way to check this ability is to give the candidate an interview to translate into, say, Vietnamese. If the candidate succeeds, then there will be no problem with translating from Vietnamese into Russian.?

Where does one look for such a specialist?

On the one hand, there are quite a few channels where one can find a UX specialist. On the other hand, the principal channel is one’s own network. This is the simplest way to find a person fast and to be sure in their qualifications.

But this way is not available to most people. What do you do if this is the case for you? There are many options.

1. You can create a job on LinkedIn and on a local job hunting website.?

875 million people are registered on LinkedIn, so at the very least, you can generate demand for the job there. And don't forget about websites similar to hh.ru in other countries.

2. You can create a project on Upwork, Fiverr or another freelance marketplace.

The logic here is quite similar to that with LinkedIn, but there the job you post will reach fewer people, though the price may also be smaller.

3. Find specialized chats/groups. Look for local social network groups dedicated to UX. Though searching for and selecting candidates there will take much time, because you will have to work using a dictionary.

4. Find private communities. Private business communities with Russian expats are a great source of knowledge for entering a market in general. Entrepreneurs who have already conducted similar interviews can be part of such communities. They may give you recommendations. There can also be people who conduct UX interviews in your country of interest.

5. You can contact UX online schools. Every respectable country has UX courses. Find them and ask them to share their best alumni’s contact info.

6. Post on Reddit. Reddit has a lot of subreddits on design/UX like this one. You might find just the perfect candidate there.

7. Find translators’ groups. Strange as it may seem, translators like to become UX specialists, coming to the field with three crucial skills: working with speech, a great knowledge of two languages, and an experience in translating texts.

8. Research italki. Though italki has a very different goal, hundreds of thousands of people who like to talk are registered on the platform. We have found specialists in UX interviews among them.

This is not a comprehensive list of possible channels. There is also Twitter

Twitter, Slack channels, etc. But the options on the list are a good starting point. Many things also depend on the level specialist you need. Senior specialists can be found through LinkedIn and networking, other channels work worse. Mid-level specialists can be found via LinkedIn and closed communities. Other channels also work, but not as well as these.

A general recommendation: have at least 2 to 3 weeks assigned for looking for the specialist. If you have never before hired a UX specialist, you should consider at least 10 candidates.?

Oh, and don't forget to post a job on hh.ru, you can find foreigners who came to learn Russian.

Step 2. Looking for respondents

Here are a few ways that we use regularly:

1. Groups/chats on social media. This works with B2C and B2B. If we're lucky, we will find a chat or a group with our target audience. If we fail to find one, we go another way. We look for keywords in posts or comments, try image-based search in a certain topic (for instance, home offices on Pinterest). In the end, you can launch ads targeted at the relevant audience.
2. Specialized services. This works with B2C (cheaper) and B2B (more expensive). Services such as respondent.io or User Interviews work like a hiring service. You set search criteria and potential respondents reach out. If the respondent suits you, you set up an interview, conduct it, and then you pay for the respondent’s time. Depending on the topic and the country, the price of one interview ranges from $10 to $1,000.
3. Your UX specialist’s network. This works with B2C. Your specialist has friends who have other friends. If the product is not very niche, they will find 3 to 7 people in their network. This would be enough to understand the market’s needs at a first approximation.
4. LinkedIn. This works with B2B. There are two ways when working with LinkedIn. The first one is to post job and conduct the interview like this. The advantage of such an approach is that you find respondents quickly, whereas the disadvantage is that you are unlikely to manage to conduct a full interview and ask all the questions. The second way is to find competitors’ employees based on the jobs you are interested in, and try to interview them. We spoke about the importance of communicating with competitors here

General recommendation: if your budget allows for it, use a specialized service. Thus, you will get the respondents 10 times faster.

Other ideas on how to find respondents were described in this article

Step 3. Conducting the interviews and handling the results

The first thing you need to remember is that the interviews are conducted in a language you don't know. And the problem of having an interview in, say, Portuguese, is that you, as the client, cannot be sure of the interview’s quality: you won't know if all the questions were asked, and all the unclear things were double-checked.

So, ask the specialist to make two transcripts. First, to transcribe the dialogue, i.e., give you a text version of the whole interview. Second, to give you the answers to the questions on your list.

This is the only way for you to know that your UX specialist did not miss anything, and all the nuances of choosing the product were dealt with during the interview.?

You should keep in mind that each stage (recruitment, conducting interviews, and transcribing them) takes more time than in Russian. Firstly, if there is a big time difference between you and the UX specialists/respondents, there is always a lag in communication, setting up interviews, etc. Secondly, making 2 transcripts takes more time.?

Finally, together with the UX specialist, you should study the specifics of communicating with the local audience: possibly, there are some terms that are specific to the local market, or there is a certain style of communication to be complied with. It is the UX specialist’s job to tell you about these nuances.?

In conclusion

In this article, we have dealt with many aspects of conducting interviews on the international market but with left a few of them out (they deserve a separate article).

The most important conclusions I would draw from this article are:?

• There is a big difference between interviews abroad and all your local market. The former require more resources, time, and depth;
• The importance of interviews on the international market is a much higher. As for the Russian market, you know a lot about the way it works even without the interviews. But in a new country, interviews are a way to submerge oneself not just into the needs of the market, but in the market itself.

Need help in finding respondents and conducting interviews on a new market?

Contact us at Hints via our website or Telegram