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190 CHAPTER 8 Interviews and focus groups

ask about existing technology practices, but your primary goal is to understand user
needs and goals, so you might want to focus on asking high-level questions about
types of functionality that are and aren't available, as opposed to specific details of
design that may be troublesome.
Asking these broader questions in an interview or focus group can help you gen-
erate a deeper and more nuanced understanding of the problem. You might ask the
following exploratory questions to understand how people use these media:
• What sort of recordings do you make of personal events? Pictures? Videos?
Audio Recordings?
• How do you view these recordings? On a computer? On a TV?
• Where do you view them? Any particular rooms in the house? Outside the house?
• Who do you show them to? On what sort of occasions?
• How do you organize recordings?
• Do you ever make multiple records of a single event? How do you keep them
together?
• Do you share these artifacts with friends or family? If so, how?
• Have you ever lost track of any particularly valuable photo or video?
• Do you edit photos or video?
• Do you distinguish between recordings that you've made and those that were
made by family members or others?
• Have you found yourself interested in doing something with your recordings
that your tools did not support? If so, what?
Note that interviews at this stage are not focused on specific questions of func-
tionality and design. The goal is to understand the needs and challenges presented
by a particular situation. Once those needs are well understood, you can move on to
specific details that would lead to a concrete design.
Exploratory interviews share much in common with case studies (Chapter 7) and
ethnography (Chapter 9), as they are all intended to provide an understanding of a
complex and multifaceted situation. Interviews and focus groups have the advantage
of being relatively easy and inexpensive to conduct: a series of four or five focus
groups in different neighborhoods, each containing 5–10 individuals, could be used
to collect a broad range of data in a matter of weeks, where case studies and ethnog-
raphy might take months.
One study used this approach to understand why and when people replace cell
phones, in the hopes of finding possibilities for designing phones and practices
that would be more sustainable (Huang and Truong, 2008). Researchers combined
web surveys with follow-on telephone interviews with a small number of partici-
pants. Analysis of over 700 items from the surveys and the interviews led to an
understanding of why people replace phones (e.g., incentives to renew contracts or
phone malfunctions) and what they do with old phones (give them to friends, do-
nate to charities, hold on to them, or throw them out). These and other insights led
to design suggestions, including the possibility of using contact lists to automati-
cally identify friends who might need a new phone, modular designs that might