Interviewing

Discussion articles

• Conducting successful SME interviews
  "Interviewing subject matter experts (SMEs) is one of the most common and useful methods for obtaining the information needed to create quality documents. Successful SME interviews require careful research and preparation in advance. During the interview, good listening skills, critical analysis, and the ability to maintain control of the range and depth of the interview with appropriate tact are crucial to successful outcomes. After the interview, give prompt attention to notes and any required follow-through. When working with hostile SMEs or those with poor communication skills emphasize the strengths of the relationship and develop strategies to work around any weaknesses."
  (Jennifer Lambe)

• Face to face with your users: running a non-directed interview
  In a non-directed interview, the interviewer is more than just a conversation partner; you have to behave differently. You must be more vigilant about the meaning of your words and their implications. An accidental ambiguity can cause you and your interviewee to use the same word very differently; a leading question can guide an interviewee to provide a different answer than what they truly believe.

• Focus setting: getting the right interview mix
  Knowing the type of project you have (tactical or strategic) drives your focus setting decisions. Once your focus is set, you need the right role mix and organisation mix to collect the appropriate amount of customer data. There are guidelines you can follow to help you make good decisions about who and where to interview.

• Good interview data: it's more than just the facts
  Facts are not the data that matters for design. Interpreting facts with the customer during the interview reveals design needs. Using a chain of reasoning with the customer brings you to a shared understanding of what the facts mean. Offering a hypothesis is more effective than asking open-ended questions.

• Keeping a contextual inquiry from becoming a traditional interview
  Sometimes it can be difficult, especially when you are just beginning to do contextual inquiry interviews, to keep the customer interview on track. The interview starts out great: you're in the field, you're with the real user, you're at the user's desk, home, or wherever the real work takes place. But then at some point during the interview you realise things have gone awry. You are asking questions and the user is answering you, but you aren't seeing him or her do their real work practice. I'm willing to bet it's because you didn't pay attention to (or know about) the triggers that signal you've slipped out of contextual inquiry behavior and reverted to traditional interviewing or questionnaire mode.

• Listening with respect: David Greenberger interviews
  David's work shows the power of listening with respect--not scripting or forcing the interaction, but rather setting some context and then letting the interviewee lead. As you'll see, this leads to unexpected moments. Included is Mark Hurt's interview of David Greenberger.

• Nondirected interviews: how to get more out of your research
  As user experience designers, a key component to nearly all the techniques we use in our practice is the one-on-one interview. It’s the basis of requirements gathering, usability testing, and task analysis. In order to remove our personal biases, expectations and opinions from the questions asked, I practice a kind of questioning technique called the nondirected interview.

• Six steps to better interviews and simplified task analysis
  I spend a lot of time helping clients conduct task analysis to form mental-model diagrams. When teams first start analyzing the interview transcripts they’ve collected, they often run into a confidence issue. 'How will we know if we get the task groups right?' This question usually arises because the team doesn’t have the kind of details it needs to identify clear tasks. The problem isn’t in sorting; it’s in the data-gathering stage. If interviews don’t provide details, task sorting becomes much more complex. Fortunately, there are six simple things you can do to improve the quality of your interviews, and clarify task analysis.

• That's a good question
  " All of us have suffered the consequences of expensive, unasked questions both in our professional lives and our personal lives. This article offers information as to why questions are so important, who needs to improve discovery skills, what process you should use to develop your questions, what types of questions are useful, how to strategize your questions, how to ask good questions, how to handle people answering the questions you ask them, and how to answer questions that are asked of you."
  (Elizabeth Frick)

• User research abroad: handle logistics in four easy steps
  In our industry, we are often asked to conduct non-directed interviews by telephone with audiences around the globe. This presents several logistical challenges.