Looking for some 'best practice' resources for myself, I came across a great article that provides 17 tips for successful user research. While the article is geared towards user experience designers, I've summarized four important lessons that relate to our experiences interviewing subjects for the final report. By sharing these lessons with you, I hope they help you get the most content out of your interviews. 1) Always record the session if possible:
Never rely on yourself to remember the important points in an interview. If you don't record the interview, you will likely forget and misinterpret relevant information for your report. Further, not recording prevents each team member from being able to go back and reflect critically on the interview. And as we have learned the 'hard way', make sure your recording technology is prepared: fully charged and with enough space available on the memory card.
2) Consent is key:
Related to recording your interviewees - don't forgot to ask permission to record him/her! Let the interviewer know why you are recording, who has access to the recording, and what information you could potentially pull from the transcript. A lot of this information should be included in your consent forms - which you should get them to sign before the interview begins - but it is wroth verbalizing some of the important information for the sake of maximum transparency/comfort.
2) Write up:
Immediately after an interview, it helps if you summarize the interview findings in a short write-up. By just taking the additional 30 mins while the interview is fresh in your mind, you can reduce a lot of the work of having to go through all of your interviews again to find trends/patterns for your report. While you'll likely need to go over the interviews again for quotes, you wont need to go over them again to get a reminder of what the interviewee was generally talking about.
4) Think about the context and environment:
This is something I learned while interviewing one of our subjects. Avoid booking interviews in coffee shops because the noise levels make it too difficult to record and/or understand the interviewee. We have noticed that offering to meet our subjects in their offices is a much more productive interview environment.
Article:
https://medium.com/fluxx-studio-notes/17-tips-for-successful-user-research-interviews-5042b2360b08
Great post, so relevant with the projects we've been working on! These are really good points to keep in mind especially for qualitative interviews where the informants are giving us such detailed responses. Recording the interview followed by a write-up is a really good tip, especially because much of the knowledge, experience, and perspectives that are being expressed depend a lot on tone and context, so having a recorded copy is a good reference.
ReplyDeleteThis is a great post, and provides valuable information for the group paper!
ReplyDeleteMy group members and I followed all of the tips listed above, and even split up roles in order to ensure our interview strategies were both, effective and efficient. It is recommended to have an individual record, while another person summarizes the information on their computer. This allows a perfect opportunity to compare findings, in order to ensure information is accurate and documented using the proper context.
Another tip is to avoid having a panel interview. Since it was typically 5 members against 1 interviewee, our group attempted to create a circular conversation, in order to make the interviewee feel more comfortable and open to answering our interview questions. We didn't want the interviewee to feel as if they were under intense questioning. Therefore, we attempted to have a comfortable free flowing conversation with our interview subjects, in order to receive valuable, honest data.