Interview Techniques for UX Practitioners

A User-Centered Design Method

Chauncey Wilson

• Publisher: Morgan Kaufmann
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780124104501
• Topic: Computer Science
• Subtopic: Human-Computer Interaction
• Index: Computer Science

Much of the work of user-centered design practitioners involves some type of interviewing. While interviewing is an important skill, many colleagues have little or no formal training in interviewing methods and often learn on the job with limited feedback on the quality of their interviews.

This book teaches readers about the three basic interview methods: structured interviews, semi-structured interviews, and unstructured interviews. The author discusses the various strengths, weaknesses, issues with each type of interview, and includes best practices and procedures for conducing effective and efficient interviews. The book dives into the detailed information about interviews that haven't been discussed before – readers learn how and when to ask the "how" and "why" questions to get a deeper understanding of problems, concepts, and processes, as well as discussions on laddering and critical incident techniques.

Because so much of what UX practitioners do involves good interviewing skills, this is your one-stop resource with the definitions, processes, procedures and best practices on the basic approaches.

Chapter 1

Structured Interviews

The structured interview method ask interviewers to ask a fixed set of questions in a standardized manner. This chapter provides strengths and weaknesses of this method, the procedures for planning and conducting structured interviews, and tips for gathering reliable data. The structured interview is useful for gather demographics, understanding user knowledge, comparing results across groups on a fixed set of responses, and gathering attitude and opinion data.

Keywords

Interview; questionnaire; standardized interview; structured interview; semi-structured interview

Outline

Overview of Structured Interviews

When Should You Use Structured Interviews?

Strengths

Weaknesses

What Do You Need to Use Structured Interviews?

Personnel, Participants, and Training

Hardware and Software

Documents and Materials

Procedures and Practical Advice on Structured Interviews

Planning the Structured Interview

Training Your Interview Team on How to Standardize the Structured Interview

Conducting the Structured Interview

After the Structured Interview Session

Variations and Extensions to Structured Interviews

Major Issues with Structured Interviews

Low Popularity

Sensitive Topics

Data Quality: Types of Questions That May Lead to Poor Data Quality

Conclusions

Alternate Names: Directive interview, researcher-administered survey, standardized interview

Related Methods: Questionnaire, semi-structured interviews, unstructured interviews

Overview of Structured Interviews

The structured interview is a verbal questionnaire in which the interaction is limited by a script and a fixed set of questions. You might be familiar with structured interviews from those intrusive phone surveys that you get in the evening when you are sitting down to dinner with your family. Just as you are about to partake of a culinary feast, you get a call. Someone introduces himself as part of the “Howard Survey Company,” and he wants to ask you “a few” questions. You must decide between eating hot food and taking the survey.

Structured interviews can be conducted in person, over the phone, or through collaboration technologies such as chat. The structured interview has a specific format that interviewers are asked to follow with as little deviation as possible. It uses both closed and open questions to gather information on specific issues but most often asks participants to select a response from a numerical range or set of fixed responses.

Every participant is generally asked the same questions in the same order (or an order prescribed by screening questions). For closed questions, participants answer questions using standardized response categories. Here is a simple example of a closed question with standard response categories:

How would you rate the usability of Product “X”? Very Good, Good, Fair, or Poor

The emphasis on standardization of the questions and responses is to ensure that answers can be reliably grouped and compared.

What if People Don’t Give You Standardized Answers?

For the question provided previously about the usability of a product, you might get an answer such as the following: “The usability is pretty good.” Does this mean that the usability is “good” or “fair”? Asking the participant what “good” or “fair” means is a bad practice because participants respond differently to response scales with different numbers of items; here, you now have a scale with two items rather than the original four items (Fowler & Mangione, 1990). The appropriate thing to do is to repeat all the response alternatives to make sure the answer is not a function of the interviewer’s scale truncation. Repeating the response categories each time can feel awkward, especially if you have a long list of rating scales, but consistent repetition is important for consistency. You might include a note in your script that you will be repeating the scale each time to ensure consistency across all your interviews.

Structured interviews are most appropriate when the product team is aware of the major issues in a project and wants to collect detailed and consistent information about those specific issues. Structured interviews often benefit from the results of previously conducted unstructured or semi-structured interviews that expose the most important issues for users and ranges of reactions to those issues.

When Should You Use Structured Interviews?

The structured interview is useful for the following:

• Obtaining general information about demographics (e.g., years of experience in a role, gender, education, professional affiliations), behaviors (e.g., “how many times did you call technical support in the past month?”), and relationships (e.g., “who do you have to work with on a major project?”).

• Assessing knowledge about a subject. Knowledge questions are used to determine the level of knowledge held by an individual or group of individuals.

• Gathering focused information about stakeholders and their attitudes toward a product, set, or process.

• Asking specific questions after you understand the broad issues of a particular domain, product, or project.

• Collecting uniform data from a large sample of participant and organizations.

• Comparing results across different groups of users on a fixed set of responses. For example, you might want to compare how well various groups of users compare on satisfaction scores.

Structured interviews can last from several minutes (short interviews in malls, airports, or fast-food restaurants) to several hours for in-depth interviews with dedicated participants.

Structured interviews can be used throughout the development cycle (Table 1.1) but are most useful when the goals and major issues of a project are well understood and you know enough to generate a list of expected response categories. The small bar charts in Table 1.1 provide a sense of the overall effort, planning time, skill, resources, and analysis time, required to conduct structured interviews.

Table 1.1

Method Scorecard for Structured Interviews

Strengths

Structured interviews have the following strengths:

• Relatively untrained interviewers can more easily conduct these interviews than semi-structured or unstructured interviews. Training and interview development is generally less costly than it is for less structured interviews.

• Responses are more reasonably comparable (than less structured interviews) because all interviews are based on the same set of questions and response categories.

• Structured interviews can be done face-to-face, over the telephone, or through video conferencing systems like Microsoft Lync or Skype.

• Data analysis is relatively easy given that most questions have structured responses. You can easily aggregate data and compare data among subgroups.

Weaknesses

Structured interviews have the following weaknesses:

• Creating valid and reliable structured questions and responses requires solid background in questionnaire design—something that is often missing from product teams. Developing structured interview questionnaires may seem easy, but it is not.

• If you are not sure you are asking the right questions in your structured interview, you can end up with precise answers to the wrong questions. Structured interviews are most useful when you have conducted earlier studies to understand the domain or problem area of interest.

• Structured interviews require interviewers to behave consistently when reading questions, probing, and recording answers. This is not as easy as it sounds (Fowler & Mangione, 1990). Interviewers can become less consistent as they get tired, start to anticipate answers, or start to use shortcuts.

• The goal of standardization can make it difficult for interviewers to gain rapport with participants. A rigid script doesn’t help the interviewer connect well with the participant.

• The structured interview puts participants in a more passive role than semi-structured or unstructured interviewing. Structured interviewing may give participants the impression that the interview team has already made up its mind about what is important.

What Do You Need to Use Structured Interviews?

This section provides a br...

Table of contents

• Cover image
• Title page
• Table of Contents
• Copyright
• Interviews
• Chapter 1. Structured Interviews
• Chapter 2. Semi-Structured Interviews
• Chapter 3. Unstructured Interviews
• Chapter 4. Phone Interviews
• Chapter 5. Focus Groups
• Chapter 6. General Interviewing Issues
• Bibliography