Media: Guidelines for Fieldwork Interviews that get the Right Information

"When Bad Things Happen to Good Interviews: Keeping a CI from becoming a traditional interview" is written by Shelley Wood of the InContext team and it's really good. It looks at how you can louse up a Contextual Inquiry session, how you can notice you are doing so and how you can get it back on track.

'The interview starts out great: you're in the field, you're with the real user, you're at the user's desk, home, or wherever the real work takes place. But then at some point during the interview you realize things have gone awry. You are asking questions and the user is answering you, but you aren't seeing him or her do their real work practice. The user is either giving you one-word answers, or long explanations about what the he or she "typically" does. It feels like your questions aren't getting very good data, it's all high level and not detailed.'

The list of triggers that show you are wandering off course and the suggested responses are stuff to cut out and keep.

Associated Link: InContext: When Bad Things Happen to Good Interviews

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