In-Depth Customer Interviews: Conducting the Interview
Once participants arrive, the interviews are mainly a matter of ensuring that the data you need to capture as outlined in the interview protocol is captured. After the first couple of interviews, the research lead will develop a sense of topics that are most likely to result in data that will be useful to innovative design work in the future. The research team should debrief after each interview to discuss whether the research protocol should be modified for any reason. Some questions or exercises don’t work as well as planned in terms of data capture and participation, and need to be amended or omitted. In my experience, the most changes are made either after the first session, the first day, or the first round of interviews.
As time goes by, the interview moderator may modify the interview for each participant to get the most value out of the interview. Some people feel that this is problematic because modifications to the interview precludes comparisons of data across participants for a given set of variables. My feeling is that assigning such weight and rigor to variables that are being measured qualitatively is to misunderstand the nature of the data being collected in customer interviews. I feel that it is best to get the most value out of each interview and to characterize each participant as clearly as possible, and then to compare variables across participants to the degree that it makes sense for the type of data being collected. If a participant is leading me down an interesting trail of discovery toward a potential opportunity for design innovation, then I will follow that trail in lieu of other sections of the interview that I feel will not be as fruitful. My sense of where to take the interview has developed over many years of interviewing customers for the purpose of creating innovative web sites.