Usability Testing Interviewing

Usability testing interviewing is simpler than ethnographic interviewing, but shares many principles.

Rubin, Jeffrey, Handbook of Usability Testing: How to Plan, Design, and Conduct Effective Tests. Wiley, 1994   Chapter 7, Chapter 8.  If you have the book, read ch.9, too.

(This book is worth buying — a classic — get the new edition, 2008.)

The new edition out and  sample forms and scripts are online:

Interviewing, General

Slides from Spring, 2010 — Very thorough; we’re not going to go over all this in class but you MUST know this material to be a good interviewer.

Video Getting People to Talk: An Ethnography & Interviewing Primer: very useful. Well worth the time.

Done by IIT Institute of Design.  Interviews with people who do ethnographic interviews for human-centered design.  You have to get past the intro on-the street interviews  — I can’t imagine anyone in Berkeley being willing to do these interviews, given how many people on the street here want money, signatures on petitions, and the like.

Note also the variability in sound quality and where and how they place some interviewees.  They make some pretty basic mistakes.

I don’t recommend making people sing and cry.

Irving Seidman, Interviewing as Qualitative Research: ch. 6, Technique Isn’t Everything, But It Is a Lot. This is a good reading to start with. Basics.

Robert S. Weiss, Learning from Strangers – The Art and Method of Qualitative Interview Studies, New York: The Free Press, 1994.  Readings are long because they include long excerpts from interview transcripts.

Chapter 3 – Preparation for Interviewing
Chapter 4 – Interviewing – Part 1
Chapter 4 – Interviewing – Part 2 – Examples of Interviewing
Chapter 5 – Issues in Interviewing