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194 CHAPTER 8 Interviews and focus groups

create digital scrapbooks combining photos, audio, video, text, and other multime-
dia. You would like your tool to support “one-stop shopping”—letting users do all of
the necessary steps in one application without having to move data between multiple
tools. To make this work effectively, you would need to understand the sorts of things
people currently do to construct these scrapbooks, so that you might understand how
to build a tool that would meet user needs.
Asking users how they lay out photos in a page-layout or web-page-creation
system may be at too low a level of detail. In response to this question, an inter-
viewee might talk about very specific tools for managing page content. As interest-
ing and relevant as this may be—and it could be very interesting indeed—this line
of inquiry might fail to uncover some insights that could be much more intriguing.
If you instead were to ask the interviewee what he wanted to communicate with
the scrapbooks and who the audience would be, you might get the inspiration for
a new product or set of features aimed at completing similar tasks—insights that
you would never have had with the simpler interview questions. The following list
of questions might be asked to gather requirements for this scrapbook creation
activity:
• What sort of scrapbook are you creating? Will it cover one event or many? Is it
for family, friends, coworkers, or all of the above?
• How do you create traditional scrapbooks? What do you put into them? What do
they look like? Can you show me a scrapbook that you've made?
• What sort of things do you want to put in the scrapbook? Pictures, music,
movies, artwork? Anything else?
• How do you want to arrange things? Do you want to have individual pages like
a traditional scrapbook, or should the layout be more open-ended, as if you were
working on a large canvas?
• How would people read your scrapbook? Do you want them to have a set
start-to-finish order or should readers be free to explore any way that they
like?
• How many items would you want to put in a scrapbook?
• How and where would people read the scrapbook? Do you want to project it on
a wall? Send it via email? View it on TV or on a phone? Post it on a web page?
• Do you want to give users tools to make comments and notes on your
scrapbook?
• How would your scrapbook relate to others? Would you create links between
scrapbooks posted on your own web pages or on social networking sites?
Note how little these questions have to do with the specific tools being used.
Although this approach to interviewing may help you get started, you may find
that you need more information to truly understand user needs. Contextual inquiry—
in-depth interviews involving demonstrations of how participants complete key tasks
(see Section 8.5.2)—is a widely used technique for developing a deeper understand-
ing of how work is done. Ethnographic techniques, including observation and par-
ticipation in a group or workplace (see Chapter 9) can provide still richer insights.