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200 CHAPTER 8 Interviews and focus groups

Unstructured and semistructured interviews can be most appropriate when you
are looking to dig deeper, in search of critical comments, design requirements, and
other insights. These approaches can be particularly helpful when you are unfa-
miliar with a problem domain or set of users—when you don't even know which
questions to ask. In these cases, semistructured or unstructured interviews give par-
ticipants the chance to educate you. The understanding that you gain from their
comments can help you understand their needs and, potentially, generate appropri-
ate questions for subsequent structured interviews. Follow-up structured interviews
can be particularly helpful for validating the results of your initial semistructured
or unstructured attempts: if a second round of interviews elicits comments that are
generally consistent with feedback from the first group, you might comfortably con-
clude that those comments apply generally to a broad range of users. The Green
Living Interviews sidebar describes a research project that made extensive use of
semistructured interviews and other complementary techniques to understand the
practices of a very specific group of people, in the hopes of identifying possibilities
for the design of new tools.
Greater ease of both conducting the interviews and analyzing the results makes
fully structured interviews appropriate for your first effort. When all of your ques-
tions are explicitly spelled out, conducting an interview can be relatively straightfor-
ward. You simply ask a question, note the answer, and move on to the next question.
Semistructured and unstructured interviews can require significantly more effort, as
you will find yourself trying to decide when and how much to manage the interview
process. When do you let the interviewee digress to seemingly unrelated topics?
When should you let the interviewee talk and when should you direct the conversa-
tion? If you are working with someone who is not at all talkative, how can you get
them to open up? Given these and other challenges, you might want to stay away
from less-structured techniques until you've had some experience in interviewing.

8.5.2 FOCUSED AND CONTEXTUAL INTERVIEWS

Interviews in HCI research often revolve around the specific context of a problem
or technology. We might be interested in how people use an existing system or how
they solve a problem that might be addressed by software that has not yet been built.
In circumstances such as these, an interview might go beyond simply asking ques-
tions; it might ask for demonstrations and more in-depth explorations. By asking
interviewees to demonstrate how they solve a problem, instead of explaining how
they do it, these interviews have the potential to illustrate aspects of the problem that
might have been forgotten in a strictly verbal interview. Thomas Malone's classic
work on office organization (see the Finding and Reminding sidebar) provides an
example of this approach. To understand how people organize information, Malone
asked people to show him around their offices, indicating where they store things
(Malone, 1983). Hugh Beyer and Karen Holtzblatt expand upon this approach, pro-
viding a detailed inquiry model in their book on Contextual Design (Beyer and
Holtzblatt, 1998) (see Contextual Inquiry sidebar).