| Author: | Javed Khan |
| Learning Line: | Digital Transformation |
| Course: | DT4: Data-driven Design |
| Week: | 1 |
| Competencies: | – understand the principles of user-centered design – know (part of) the process of user-centered design |
| BoKS: | 4K1 – The student is familiar with user-centered design principles and processes and knows how to apply them in specific (business) contexts. 4K2 – The student understands how to elicit requirements for an AI & Data Science product. A4, Human-centered: putting people / users first, as a starting point and thinking of technology as enabler and not the end-goal. |
| Learning Goals: | be able to prepare for conducting a semi-structured interview with representative (i.e. target) users |
Introduction
The goal of this workshop is to prepare you to properly conduct a semi-structured interview with target users. The primary goal for conducting this type of research is to discover your target users’ context and unmet needs, emphasize with them, and draw inspiration to conceptualize an AI product.
By the end of this workshop you will have:
1. specified and decided who are your target users
2. have written a plan to recruit them
3. have written a list of questions, grouped in categories, for the interviews
4. VERY IMPORTANT: have a consent form
Why conduct interviews with target users? An important stifling factor for designing and developing successful technologies is to quickly assume things and jump into solutions, before taking the time to understand the challenge and empathize with the people that face it. This is why you want to conduct semi-structured interviews.
In Design Council’s “Double Diamond” model of the design process (Fig.1) the step of coming up with several creative ideas, would be the “Discover” part of the process.
Exercise 1: Decide your target users
To help you decide for target users, you can draw inspiration from societal challenges. Those challenges can be at a global, continental, national, provincial or municipal level. For example, on a global level, the United Nations have developed the Sustainable Development Goals (or SDGs for short). For example, SDG 2 is Zero Hunger. Unfortunately, there are still millions of people that starve to death. At the same time there is an enormous wastage of food in several parts of the world. Thus, inspired by this goal and after investigating a bit more who wastes food, you decide to conduct user research in a typical household in the Netherlands and you decide to target dual-income families and therefore interview both parents and their children to find out more about their eating habits and what goes to waste. In the same manner you can also try to find out challenges in a national level. For example, the Dutch government has recently specified key areas for funding universities and other research organizations to conduct research. A key area that you might have also heard a lot in the news is energy transition. For that reason, you decide to conduct user research with social housing companies and decide to interview managers and employees in those companies to understand how they prepare for energy transition and what challenges they face.
Exercise 2: Recruit users/participants
After having decided who your target users are, you need to develop a plan on how to approach them. Ideally, you want to reach out to people that you do not know. This is both because they are biased towards you and you towards them but also because in real circumstances you will actually not know your participants. Therefore see it as an opportunity to develop that experience. At the same time you want to make it feasible for yourself since you do not have a lot of time and resources. Therefore an advice is to reach out to friends-of-friends, i.e. ask friends or family to help you out in recruiting people they know but you don’t. In my experience, there are no silver bullets. You need to try all means; thus ask your family and friends to reach out to their family and friends, use social media, email, etc. In the following link you will find some good tips for preparing for the interview: https://www.wikihow.com/Conduct-Interviews-for-Research and in the following video some tips on how to incentivize your participants:
Exercise 3: Prepare questions
After having recruited your participants and before you conduct the interview you want to have prepared some questions. Go through the list of the type of questions you can ask and write down individually your own. Present in your group, get feedback, improve them and decide as a group a final list of questions. Remember that you want to avoid closed questions and mainly ask open questions.
Exercise 4: Prepare an informed consent form
Finally, you must make sure you have an informed consent form cause you want to at least audio record the interview so that you can hear it back.
Here are some templates of informed consent forms:
– From TU Delft
– From Maastricht University
– From University of Edinburgh
– From University of British Columbia
For more information I would refer you to Chapter 8 of the Interaction Design textbook.
Good luck with conducting your semi-structured interviews!