Interview
Why?
It is hard to design for users you do not fully understand. Interviews allow you to understand users better by gathering their opinions, behaviours, goals, attitudes and experiences.
How?
Invite representative participants, make them feel comfortable and ask questions about your topic of interest, for example product usage.
Ingrediënts
- Typically 5 to 10 users.
- An interview guide with topics or questions.
- Active listening skills.
- Be able to improvise and ask 'why' a lot.
In practice
Interviews are widely used throughout design projects, but most often in the early stages of design.
- Universal methods of design (Martin & Hannington , 2012) spend a couple of pages about interviews In the dutch version: chapter 48, p102-103
- A compact and comprehensive book about interview techniques (in Dutch) is Basisboek Interviewen (Baarda & van Hulst, 2012)
- Observing the User Experience (Goodman, Kuniavsky, Moed, 2012) has a comprehensive chapter on interviewing. Chapter 6. P129-141