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8.5 Interview strategies 199

down on your list. Your goal should be to dig through the interviewee's com-
ments, opportunistically looking for possibilities to gain additional insight and
understanding.
Unstructured interviews take this idea to its logical extreme. An unstructured
interview may simply be based on a list of topics or questions known as an interview
guide (Robson, 2002). To conduct an unstructured interview, you would start off
with an initial question for your interviewee, and then you would listen, letting the
interviewee respond as she sees fit, discussing topics of her choosing. If conversa-
tion slows or stalls, you might introduce another topic or question from your inter-
view guide. As the main benefit of using unstructured interviews lies in letting your
interviewees focus on the topics and concerns that they find important, you should
avoid imposing too much structure.
Semistructured and unstructured interviews open up the possibility of exploring
topics in a depth and breadth that may be harder to achieve with fully structured in-
terviews. As interviewee comments lead you to ask questions that you hadn't thought
of and as they discuss issues that you had overlooked, your understanding of their
concerns and perspectives will broaden in directions that you might have missed with
a fully structured interview.
Of course, there is no such thing as a free lunch: interviews with less structure
require more skill to conduct. When do you dig deeper in response to a comment?
When do you back off and move on to something else? How do you keep inter-
viewees on track or deal with those who answer in monosyllables? Effectively man-
aging these challenges requires a fair amount of skill, which may come only with
experience.
Less structure also means more challenges in interpretation. Semistructured or
unstructured interviews may go all over the map, with related topics discussed in
multiple places throughout the interview. You may need to collect comments made
at very different points, searching through your notes, recordings, or transcripts, to
find closely related topics.
These different types of interview can also be distinguished by considering who's
in charge. As they are controlled largely by the interviewer, fully structured and semi-
structured interviews are often described as respondent interviews. In unstructured
interviews, the interviewee's comments direct the course of the interview, with the
interviewer following along and responding as necessary. As the interviewee is in
control, these interviews are also described as informant or nondirective interviews.
These names help remind us that the comments of the interviewee may be very struc-
tured, even if the interviewer does not impose any structure on the conversation: the
perceived presence or absence of structure depends upon the viewpoint that is being
considered (Robson, 2002).
How should you choose between these different styles? Fully structured inter-
views are most appropriate when you hope to compare responses across individuals.
All interviewees are asked the same questions, so comparison should be straightfor-
ward. These comparisons are often most useful for evaluations aimed at understand-
ing user responses to designs or systems.