[MUSIC] Welcome to Introduction to User Experience Design. Today, we will discuss interviews in detail, including its goal, the type of data we can collect, and also some advantages and disadvantages associated with this study technique. The goal of an interview is to gather indepth information from a user. An interview can take place either in the field or in the lab. The one requirement is that there is enough privacy that the user can freely answer the questions being asked. The interview offers the designer an opportunity to have a conversation with the user. This is valuable because the interviewer can then follow any interesting lead the user can have. At this point, I want to remind you that we already had a lesson on how to come up with a plan for interacting with the user. You may want to watch that now if you haven't in a while. During the interview session, the data collected will mostly be qualitative. Qualitative data may be a set of notes written by the designer as he interviews the user, or it may be a systematic analysis from the transcripts of the interview. Quantitative data may also be collected at the beginning of the interview session, in the form of a short survey. This may be used to get quick and demographic information or a sense of what the attitudes are about the topic at hand. The interviewer can use this information to start the session. All of the techniques we will discuss have advantages and shortcomings. Among the advantages of interviews is that it is an opportunity to have a one on one discussion with the user. Closely related is the fact that the protocol for the interview is very flexible. By this, I mean that the designer can choose to ask followup questions that weren't on the protocol or even to let the user lead a particular point of interest. Disadvantages include the need for a skilled interviewer. She needs to know what user leads to follow and when to rein in a conversation that is no longer providing a value added. The interviewer skills are also important in maintaining rapport that is at once flexible and balanced. It makes the user comfortable enough to provide honest opinions, but not so much that the user wants to please the interviewer with her responses. Another disadvantage of the interview is that they are time intensive, both in regards to data collection and analyses. With surveys, you may remember that we can collect data from many users at one time. With interviewers, we're spending a lot of time on one person. Also, qualitative analysis are more laborious than, say, calculating descriptive data for a survey. Interviews are most useful when they are a culmination of the data gathering strategy. This means that the designer was at a point in the requirements gathering process when the problem faced was well understood and what was needed was some final clarifications or insights from the user. In this lesson we discussed interviews. I look forward to seeing you in our next lesson, where we will consider how to present the data we collected during the various requirement gathering techniques. >> [MUSIC]