Model-Based Interview Method Selection Approach in Participatory Design

Introduction

A user-friendly designed interface is essential for engaging more users to use applications and software, especially if there are various applications serving the same goal. Most people interact with different applications in their daily life, and it is a reasonable assumption that they prefer the applications which are easiest to interact with. Therefore, having a graphical user interface to satisfy users' needs is a requirement. One of the critical aspects of designing interfaces is to find out what are the most vital end-users’ needs and their knowledge of using a system. There are multiple cases where it is essential to gather information from the end-user during the designing process. To obtain information from the end-users, as co-designers in a co-design environment, designers combine participatory design techniques (Simonsen and Robertson, 2013; Spinuzzi, 2005) with interview methods. The process includes involving the users or owners of the products in some or all phases of the design.

There are different participatory design interview methods, one of the most basic ones is the traditional face-to-face interview, where the designer meets the co-designer in person, and use paper and pencil to gather information according to the design phase prerequisites. This interview method is not the most efficient way to have everything on paper, it may slow down the process of gathering information, mislead the test participant or even make them tired (Heintz et al., 2015). There are other interview methods developed such as think-aloud (Nielsen et al., 2002), post-task, and survey-based (Baauw et al., 2004) interviews. In this chapter some more recent interview methods are presented, and they are analyzed and compared with each other and with traditional Face-to-Face interview, to demonstrate why choosing the most efficient interview method is beneficial in participatory design.

GUI interaction interviews (GUI-ii) (Pettersson et al., 2017) is a new interview method where interviewees are creating user interfaces and interact with them. It is interesting to evaluate its benefits under different conditions, to find out its limitations, advantages, and disadvantages. There are various approaches for using the GUI-ii interview method, such as face-to-face interview, interviewing via screen-sharing and interviewing using the Ozlab web application (Pettersson and Siponen, 2002; Pettersson and Wik, 2015) which provides Wizard-of-Oz (Steinfeld et al., 2009) (Schlögl et al., 2015) functionalities to enhance the interactive experience (Pettersson et al., 2018).

Majority of designers go through different interview methods to get the necessary information from the users according to their needs, whether it is remote, face-to-face or combination of interview methods. Nonetheless, wrong selection of interview method may lead to inaccurate data collection, and eventually designers will encounter with an ineffective and impractical user interface, or an unfinishable product.