Individual Interviews
Topics on This Page
- What it is and What You Learn?
- When should you conduct individual interviews?
- How do interviews differ from focus groups?
- Conducting an Interview?
What it is and What You Learn
Individual interviews typically refer to talking with one user at a time (for 30 minutes to an hour) face to face, by telephone, or with instant messaging or other computer-aided means. These interviews do not involve watching a user work. Thus, this is different from interviewing users in a usability testing session or conducting contextual interviews.
Individual interviews can give you a deep understanding of the people who come to your site. You can probe their attitudes, beliefs, desires, and experiences. You can also ask them to rate or rank choices for the Web site content.
When & How to Conduct an Interview
One technique is to use individual interviews to supplement online surveys. You can do interviews first to refine questions for the survey. Or you can do interviews after a survey to probe for details and reasons behind answers that users give on a survey.
Select representative participants and decide what you want to learn. Write an interview protocol for the interviewer to follow. The protocol includes questions and probes to use for follow-up. You may want to hire a skilled interviewer who knows how to make interviewees feel more comfortable, asks questions in a neutral manner, listens well, and knows when and how to probe for more details. You may want to get permission to tape the sessions and have one or more note takers.
Interviews & Focus Groups
Individual interviews resemble focus groups because they involve talking with users. The main difference between an individual interview and a focus group is that you are talking to one person at a time. In an individual interview:
- You have more time to discuss topics in detail.
- You do not have to worry about the group dynamics that inevitably occur in focus groups.
- You can give the interviewee your full attention and you can adjust your interviewing style to draw out a shy user or keep another user on topic.
