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In addition to gaining insights from observing people,

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it’s also valuable to interview them — ask them about their experiences directly.

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The first step in setting up an interview is deciding who it is that you’re going to interview.

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It may seem obvious

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but the most important thing is to get people who are representative of the target users of your system —

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who are the people who are going to be using your system.

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Talk to them!

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Now they may be current users of a similar system if you’re creating a better something,

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you’ll likely find current users and you’ll want to learn what they care about,

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what problems they see.

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They might also be non-users.

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So, one reason that you might be building your technology

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is to broaden the set of people that can do a certain task

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and in that case you’ll want to talk to the non-users.

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Learn about what barriers you see, learn about what their goals are.

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Say, for example, you’re designing a lecture support system.

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Who would you interview in this case?

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There’s a lot of stakeholders: You might pick the teacher.

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You might pick the students. You might also pick the teaching staff.

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Maybe the department administrators that are responsible for making sure the grading is handled properly.

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Maybe even the parents.

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It’s important to get different types of users.

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So, you might have both the freshman and a PhD student.

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You might have a domestic student and an international student.

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Somebody that’s in major and out of major.

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Stronger and weaker students.

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There are a lot of different kinds of users.

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You can’t get them all, but you’ll want to find several different people

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who are representative of major user groups, and talk to them.

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How can you find these people?

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Well, one great strategy, if you’re in the US, is to use Craigslist.

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You can also reach out through friends and family.

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Your social network is a powerful tool for finding people to interview.

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That doesn’t just mean or even primarily mean “interview your sister”;

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it means “ask your sister whom she might know”

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or “ask your friend to put you in touch with people they might know.”

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It’s quite likely that you’ll need to pay people.

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In the Bay Area, on Craigslist,

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somewhere in the land of 50 to 100 bucks for an interview seems to be the going rate.

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This gets cheaper if you can have less specialized users.

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Also, the amount that you’ll need to pay people depends on what they believe is going to be used for.

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If you can convey that in some way you’re making the world a better place,

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people may be willing to offer their time for free, even.

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On the other hand, if they believe that something will be used for a profit,

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they’ll likely want a fair wage for their time.

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If you’re a skunkworks project and don’t have enough money to really pay people,

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one thing that you can do is offer a token of appreciation.

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People often appreciate a small thoughtful gift that they can actually use, like a gift certificate or some sort,

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than they do cash.

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For example, a couple of years ago I’ve spoken at a local high school

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and the students gave me a gift certificate to a coffee shop.

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Now, the amount of money there was not much; but I meant that every time I travelled,

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I could go in the coffee shop in the airport and get a cup of coffee

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and it reminded me of that group of students and their thoughtfulness.

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Sometimes, especially early on the design project,

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it can be difficult to get a hold of exactly the users that you believe will eventually be the target.

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In this case don’t give up completely and interview nobody.

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Do the best you can; approximate if necessary.

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For example, if you are designing a system for doctors,

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early on the project, you might need to satisfice and use medical students instead of doctors.

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Or if you are working on something for software engineers, you might get computer science students.[br]

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Not ideal; better than nothing.

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I’ve been teaching and doing research in human-computer interaction for about 15 years now

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and I can’t tell you how many times I’ve talked to students or others who say that there’s nothing to be found,[br]

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that, for the problem that they’re tackling, it’s either possible or obvious.

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It’s very rarely the case that there is nothing new.

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The more mundane the domain, the more creative you need to be.

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If you don’t believe me, Malcolm Gladwell the writer

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has a wonderful explanation in the introduction to his new book of collective stories « What the Dog [Saw] ».

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“The trick to finding ideas is to convince yourself that everyone and everything has a story to tell.

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I say trick, but what I really mean is challenge, because it’s a very hard thing to do.

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Shampoo doesn’t seem interesting? Well, dammit, it must be, and if it isn’t,

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I have to believe that it will ultimately lead me [to something] that is.”

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“The other trick to finding ideas is figuring out the difference between power and knowledge.

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You don’t start at the top if you want to find the story.

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You start in the middle, because it’s the people in the middle who do the actual work in the world.

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My friend Dave, who taught me about ketchup, is a middle guy.

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He’s worked on ketchup. That’s how he knows about it.

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People at the top are self-conscious about what they say (and rightfully so)

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because they have position and privilege to protect —

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and self consciousness is the enemy of ‘interestingness.’”

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“In ‘The Pitchman’ you’ll meet Arnold Morris, who gave me the pitch

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for the ‘Dial-O-Matic’ vegetable slicer one summer day in his kitchen on the Jersey Shore:

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‘Come on over, folks.

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I’m going to show you the most amazing slicing machine you have ever seen in your life,’ he began.

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He picked up a package of barbecue spices and used it as a prop.

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‘Take a look at this!’ He held it in the air as if he were holding up a Tiffany vase.

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That’s where you find stories, in someone’s kitchen on the Jersey Shore.”

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What makes a good question when you’re interviewing?

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Let’s look an example and you can decide whether you think this is a good question.

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Our question is: “Is the daily update an important feature to you?”

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My guess when asked a question like this is that most users would say “Yes.”

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It’s kind of a leading question.

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Most people, when asked if something’s important, “Sure, why not?”

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What’s at stake? Why would you say no?[br]

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If you wanted to learn about the daily update, participant observation might be a lot more effective[br]

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because you could see whether people actually use the daily update

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or you might even use log files as a way of driving your questions.

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So, for example, you might ask somebody, “I see from the log that you’ve never used the daily update.[br]

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Why is that? Tell me more.”

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Especially early on, the more open-ended your questions are, the more interesting the answers that you’ll get.[br]

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Remember — back to our Walmart example — they asked a leading question:

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“Would you like stories with less clutter?”

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The answer, of course, is “yes”, but it may not be what people would actually want.

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Here’s another example of a question: “What would you like in a tool?”

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The problem with this question, at least as a beginning or primary question,

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is that users are experts in their own lives.[br]

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They’re not experts in design — that’s your role — so people may not know what to say.

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There’s a famous fable in design attributed to Henry Ford where he says that,

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“if I asked people what they wanted in the age of the horse and buggy,

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what they’d say they want is a faster horse.”[br]

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And of course we know that the designers used the possibility of the car,

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but users may not know about that yet.

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Instead, it’s more valuable to ask users about their own lives and their own goals.

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That’s what people are experts in.

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Here are three other types of questions to avoid because people aren’t very good at self report for them;[br]

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Asking people what they would do or like or want in a hypothetical scenario — too hard to know.

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Asking us how often we do things — We often lie to ourselves.

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For example, “How often do you exercise?” Most people overestimate in their answer to that question.[br]

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Other questions about how are things similar. This works better if you can make things concrete.[br]

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“How much do I exercise in a typical week?” — Not very reliable.

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“How much did I exercise this week?” Well, I’m likely to give more truthful answer to that one.

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It’s more concrete, and more recent in my memory.

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I suggest also avoiding asking people how much they like things on an absolute scale:

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What does “seven” mean?

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Finally, avoid binary questions, things that have a yes or no answer.[br]

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“Do you like grapefruit?” – “Yes.” Not a very interesting interview.

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So what are good questions?

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Especially at the beginning of an interview, I recommend open-ended questions.

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After asking the question, give somebody a chance to respond.

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A little bit of silence is golden.

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When I first started teaching, I made a mistake that a lot of young teachers make:

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I would ask the class for a question, and after 17 milliseconds, when nobody had answered,

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I would jump in and offer the question myself.

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I trained the students that they didn’t need to be part of the class, that I would always answer every question.

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There is no reason to participate.

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One of my colleagues taught me to wait a little longer.

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And it’s amazing, even in a quiet classroom, before students are used to interacting,

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let those few seconds of silence happen and people will start to chime in.

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The same is true in interviews.

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You may get a quick answer at first. Let some silence happen.

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After a few seconds, you’ll hear the second story. And the second story is often a lot more interesting.