Interviews

This week you will gain hands-on experience with designing and conducting semi-structured interviews. This is one of the most common data collection methods in HCI research. Importantly, interviews help us to gather information related to our known research goals as well as information that we don’t know to ask about.

Pre-Class Tasks

You should complete the following activities prior to attending your tutorial:

1. Read Chapter 8 Data Gathering in (Rogers et al., 2023). Available as an ebook through the ANU Library.

2. Read this resource: https://www.nngroup.com/articles/interview-guide/

3. Post a forum post following the instructions below:

Go back to the interface/object that you discussed in the previous tutorial¹.

Write five questions about this your interface or object. The questions are aimed at understanding the experience that someone else had with that interface or object.

Post your questions on the forum, along with a picture/sketch of the object.

4. Comment on another person’s forum post following these instructions:

Find another person’s interface/object interview questions on the forum.

Answer one of the interview questions as a comment on their question. Make sure you list the number and question that you are answering.

Design a semi-structured interview guide on the topic of the pre-class task that you submitted last Week (Week 4). Last week you identified bad design features. This week, your goal is to explore the experience that someone else had with that object/interface or a similar one.

Plan for the Class

The tutorial will follow this structure:

0. Intro and review pre-class tasks (20 mins)
1. Analyse sample questions (20 mins)
2. Designing a semi-structured interview guide (10 mins)
3. Test interviews in pairs (30 mins)
4. Reporting back and reflecting (10 mins)

In-Class Tasks

0. Review pre-class tasks (20 minutes)

As a group, look through the pre-class tasks, you tutor will check your understanding of the interview questions posted in terms of the following discussion questions:

• What are the key differences between unstructured, structured and semi-structured interviews?
• What is a focus group?
• What is the difference between open and closed questions?
• What is the difference between leading and neutral questions?
• What are probing questions?
• What makes a good interview question?
• How might the type of questions influence the data you collect?

1: Analysing sample questions (20 minutes)

You will work in small groups of 3-5 students. Each group will receive a set of cards containing a mix of interview questions. Analyse each question as follows

• Card 1: Is it a closed question or an open question? Mark the card with a C for closed and an O for open.
• Card 2: Check for bias. Is it a leading question or is it neutral? Mark the card with an L for leading and N for neutral.
• Card 3: Identify probing questions. Mark the card with a P.

2. Designing an interview guide individually (10 mins)

You will undertake the following task by yourself, but feel free to discuss and ask for/provide help in your small groups:

Expand your pre-class interview questions into a complete interview guide (don’t forget that this is covered in this week’s resource). You may wish to incorporate feedback on your questions from earlier parts of the class.

The guide should:

1. have a title
2. briefly introduce the topic.
3. include an ‘icebreaker question’ as a conversation starter
4. include 5 main questions with example probing/follow up question
5. include a prompt to thank your participants at the end

For an example interview guide, see this research paper: Sara Ljungblad et al. 2021. What Matters in Professional Drone Pilots’ Practice? An Interview Study to Understand the Complexity of Their Work and Inform Human-Drone Interaction Research. In Proc. CHI '21. (Ljungblad et al., 2021)

3. Conducting your interview in pairs (30 mins)

Now you will test your interview guide on another person in the class. You will take turns being an interviewer and a participant. If the participant has no experience with the system being discussed you’ll have to pretend 🙃.

1. Everybody: Choose another person from the tutorial to work with.
2. Interviewer: Practice interviewing them using your guide. Try and ask at least one follow-up questions that relates to their responses, but was not in your original interview guide. Do not record or write down their responses, just listen carefully.
3. Participant: Give the best responses you can, write down any feedback or suggestions you have for your interviewer.
4. After 10 minutes: interview ends, participant provides feedback to interviewer, swap roles.

4. Reporting back and reflecting (10 mins)

The tutor will bring you back together for a whole group discussion to reflect on what you learnt and observed. Think about the following questions:

1. Did your interview guide support your goal?
2. What was your experience of designing your interview guide?
3. What did you learn from testing your interview guide in a pair?
4. How might you refine and improve your interview questions based on your experiences and the feedback that you received?

Resources

• Writing an Effective Guide for a UX interview
• User Interviews 101 (nngroup)
• 6 Mistakes when crafting interview questions (nngroup)
• The 3 types of user interviews: structure, semi-structured and unstructured (nngroup)

References