Individual Interviews
What is an individual interview?Individual interviews typically refer to talking with one user at a time (for 30 minutes to an hour) face to face, by telephone, or with instant messaging or other computer-aided means. These interviews do not involve watching a user work. Thus, this is different from interviewing users in a usability testing session or conducting contextual interviews. What can you learn from an interview?Individual interviews can give you a deep understanding of the people who come to your site. You can probe their attitudes, beliefs, desires, and experiences. You can also ask them to rate or rank choices for the Web site content. When should you conduct individual interviews?One technique is to use individual interviews to supplement online surveys. You can do interviews first to refine questions for the survey. Or you can do interviews after a survey to probe for details and reasons behind answers that users give on a survey. How do interviews differ from focus groups?Individual interviews resemble focus groups because they involve talking with users. The main difference between an individual interview and a focus group is that you are talking to one person at a time. In an individual interview:
How do you conduct an interview?
Next stepsYou should use the information gathered from the internal interviews to supplement the other types of data you collect when you Learn About Your Users. |