One of the most interesting tool UX researchers have in their tool kit is User Interviews. You get to speak to people whom you have designed your product/service for. You can feel their experience with your products from what they say and usually more from what they do not say.
It's in this kind of research where the principles of communication and psychology work hand in hand. While you need to make your users comfortable, you also need to get reliable data from them. This means a lot of reading between the lines than reading the lines itself. Not just the interview but the analysis of this interview is even more interesting.
There are different kinds of user interviews based on where, how and in which mode you interview:
- Group vs Individual Group interviews: are usually focus groups. This is more of a discussion type setting where researcher asks a question and moderates the discussion. Group interviews are great to get opinions through conversations which users might not share in individual interviews. But there are also equal chances of users getting biased by others in discussion.Individual interviews: follow a definite conversation pattern between interviewer and the user. This is a good opportunity to dig deep into user's experiences and get more and more information from them. Interviewer's communication skills play a great role in making the user comfortable to share both positive and negative experiences with the product/service.
- Remote vs in-person Remote interviews: as the name suggests take place with the user being connected remotely. Such interviews can save time and efforts of users/interviewers to travel down to a place. However, because the user is far away in a remote setting it is considerably difficult to control the environment compared to in-person.In-person interviews: are great because the environment can be controlled completely. In-person interviews also help develop a decent bandwidth with user, which helps get genuine perspectives. Body language which is the most important part during interviews can be observed best in these interviews.
- Degree of structure: Structured, Semi-structured and Unstructured Structured interviews: are really more of a survey of questionnaire in a verbal form. There would be set of questions structured in specific order which would be asked to participants.Semi-structured interviews: are a great balance between structured questions and free form of discussion. In semi-structured interviews, the interviewer still has a definite set of questions but only uses as a guideline to steer the discussion. This form of interview helps in getting best of both worlds: getting questions answered and double clicking user's thoughts.Unstructured interviews: are almost a free form of conversation with your user. Usually the interviewer will have one or more topics to cover and the questions would usually depend on user's thoughts.
Source: The information is taken from series of courses on User Research by University of Michigan.
