Assignment 3: Interviewing.
I don’t think that this assignment drove home how difficult interviewing is. Beyond the difficulty of finding people to wring out for information, figuring out the important questions and the proper ways to ask them can be a daunting task. But because outside input is so valuable for both new and established products, interviews are worth the hassle.
Picking questions that don’t direct the answers of the interviewees is a difficult task. Having an entire site already made up and laid out in front of you doesn’t help. It’s also discouraging to hear replies that indicate that your idea or product is not something they are or would be interested in.
For this assignment, our questions were general and designed to get an idea of what our product should do and how it should work. Because the site is already established, we could have addressed more relevant issues, such as what would compel them to visit a new site and stay with it (how can it beat Google?), or what information they find relevant in making choices or searching.
Interviewing can be done about anything with the right people. It’s best to get as large a pool as possible, since it’s all about what users think/want. Interviews are great because they can be written or oral, but they are incredibly costly. Recruitment costs time, if not money or other incentives, and distribution can cost time and postage, unless done via the internet. Analyzing answers is also time consuming, and sometimes interpretation can be iffy. The benefits of such a flexible method of gathering current information can be discouraged by the formidable costs.
