The user interview is our chance to learn about our users directly by asking them questions and observing their behavior and environment. This Interview Protocol outlines the procedure and methods for conducting user interviews.

Interviewee Confidentiality and Consent Form

Confidentiality and consent forms are standard practice for research studies that involve direct interaction with people. They serve to make sure that interviewees understand what they are getting into, can choose to discontinue their participation at any time they see fit and that the data they provide will be kept in the strictest confidentiality. The form also helps set the interviewee at ease to provide honest, critical answers to questions that they may normally gloss over if they knew their answers were going to be made more publicly available.

All our interview teams need to carefully abide by the directives set forth in our confidentiality and consent forms. In summary, these directives are:

• Raw data from the interview will not be shared with anyone outside the interview team.
• The interview team may share the data from the interview with other research colleagues, but all personally identifiable information about the interviewee or anyone else the interviewee personally identifies will be removed. There should be no way the data can be linked back to the interviewee.
• The interviewee is free to deny responding to any questions or prompts presented by the interview team.
• The interviewee is free to end the interview at any time.

IRB Approval

An Institutional Review Board (IRB) is a committee that has been formally designated to approve, monitor, and review biomedical and behavioral research involving humans with the aim to protect the rights and welfare of the research subjects. Your institution likely has an IRB and needs to be consulted when conducting different types of research on human subjects.

Because our work for this project is related to the design of a new system, we are not asking interviewees to expose themselves to any risk or harm outside of that encountered in daily life and we are not intending to formally publish (i.e. in a journal or archived conference proceedings) our findings, we can conduct our work without IRB approval.

You may be interested, however, in seeking IRB approval at your institution for your user interviews. This would allow you to do your own analysis of the data you have collected and publish the results. This project likely qualifies as an exempt IRB case, so IRB processing may be a far faster process than normal. More information on IRB processing coming soon ...

Interview Script

The Interview Script is a document that the interviewer can follow to conduct the interview. It contains an introduction, the questions to be asked of the interviewee and topics to focus on in observation.

Interview Introduction

A good introduction before beginning the interview is necessary to make sure the interviewee understands the goals of the interview, the relationship between the interviewee and the interview team and how best to respond to questions and other prompts.

The Interview Introduction is included below and is part of the Interview Script.

Interview Questions

The interview questions can be broken down into the following sections:

• Warm-up: getting to know the instructor a little bit better and giving them some simple questions to get them feeling confident.
• General Questions: learning a little bit more about the goals, attitudes and activities of the instructor with more open-ended questions.
• Observation: focusing in on a specific activity and having the instructor think aloud, sharing details of why and how they perform tasks that comprise an activity.
• Follow-up: asking questions to clarify missing, ambiguous or confusing information from observation.

Warm-up

• How long have you been at <instructor's institution>?
• What kinds of courses do you teach?
  • Can you tell us more about the course you are currently most involved with? (If there is no definitive course: please tell us about a course you are currently teaching or, if you are not currently teaching, a course you most recently taught.)
    • How many students are there?
    • Are there multiple sections?
    • Do you work with other instructors (including students) to prepare for the course?
      • What do you do together?
    • Do you work with other instructors (including students) to conduct the course?
      • What do you do together?

General Questions

• What do you enjoy most about your job as an instructor?
  • Why?
  • What activities do you always tackle first?
• What do you enjoy least about your job as an instructor?
  • Why?
  • What activities currently waste your time?
• Please think about the course you are currently most involved with (the same course as above). Can you give us an overview of how you prepared for this course?
  • In which activities (i.e. preparing lectures, creating assignments, etc.) do you make use of scholarly resources (i.e. books, journal articles, images, video, etc.)?
    • What are the scholarly resources you make use of in different activities?
    • What made you choose the scholarly resources you did?
• What are the regular activities you participate in to conduct this course?
  • Do you make use of scholarly resources in any of these activities?
    • How do these scholarly resources add value to the activity they are a part of, if at all?

Observation

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Follow-up

Note-taking

Post-interview Debrief