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CHAPTER
8
Interviews and focus groups

8.1 INTRODUCTION
Direct feedback from interested individuals is fundamental to human-computer in-
teraction (HCI) research. What should a new tool do? Ask the users. Does a proposed
design do what it should do? If not, what should be changed or revised? Ask the us-
ers. As discussed in Chapter 5, surveys can be very useful in this regard, particularly
for reaching large numbers of people easily. Unfortunately, surveys are somewhat
limiting: respondents only answer questions that are asked, and open-ended ques-
tions that invite long, written responses are likely to go largely unanswered. As a
result, surveys often end up being broad but not deep.
An alternative approach is to go deep but not broad. Direct conversations with
fewer participants can provide perspectives and useful data that surveys might miss.
Conversation and interaction with the right people can be both a hugely important
source of insight and a significant challenge. What you ask, how you ask it, and who
you ask can determine the difference between novel insight and wasted time. Just as
with so many other topics in computing, garbage in leads to garbage out.
Direct discussions with concerned participants usually take one of two forms:
interviews with individuals and focus groups involving multiple users at one time.
Interviews and focus groups have different strengths and challenges: determining
which approach you should use is perhaps the first key question to be answered.
Other questions address structure and timing. How formal do you want to be?
Conversations can range from free-form unstructured interviews to semistructured
and fully structured interviews. When should you conduct your interviews or focus
groups? As with other data collection approaches, interviews and focus groups can
be used for both formative and summative purposes.
Having answered these questions, you're ready to face the big challenge—
actually conducting interviews or convening focus groups. Successful use of these
approaches is an art in itself, requiring significant conversational and observational
skills. Moving conversation along, eliciting meaningful responses, revising questions
based on interview responses, interpreting subtle cues, and interpreting detailed re-
sponses all require practice and experience.
This chapter discusses these issues, with an eye towards preparing you for de-
signing and conducting interviews and focus groups. The challenges are real, but
the value is there. If you don't listen to your users, you might miss some of the most
important feedback that you can get.

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