In-depth interviews

When is this method appropriate?

Generally, the users’ and customers’ behaviour is very often influenced by unconscious motives, attitudes, needs and emotions.

A trustful interview atmosphere enables to eliminate oppositions and facile rationalisations and to visualise hidden or hardly verbalisable effect coherencies and to make them interpretable.

Due to these observations pointed strategies can be derivated for a user-centered optimisation and direction of this website.

Possible questions

• Why do users interact with your website on this particular kind?
• What emotional and motivational influences do positive/negative effects have on the purchasing behaviour of your users?
• What effects do planned advertising media and other communication media (for instance for image campaigns or strongly emotionalised topics) have?
• Are your customers satisfied (identification of factors which are relevant to develop strong dissatisfactions or high customer loyalties)?

And many more…

In what project phase applicable?

• Analysis
  Especially in the early product development phase and during the identification of new products in-depth interviews provide valuable indications for user needs and attitudes. This can be used to ensure already made decisions that bases on non empirical gained data.
• Development/conception
  In-depth interviews are qualified to be added to user tests during the first draft or screens or prototypes. By this wide background information can be experienced. In addition, on the base of qualitative gained data it is possible to create personas or to enrich their detailed descriptions with further details.

What is the procedure of this method?

We use the so-called guide interview. In this interview given main points lead through the interview and at the same time this kind of interview leaves open the development of specific interview dynamic.

The single points of the guide are established on each other in a particular sequence. It is thematised by very general questions. After the open, supported exploration concrete aspects (for instance to rate customer measures or advertising media) are ascertained.

Besides the widely open and flexible non-directive interview or question structure projective and associative procedures are used in the in-depth interviews. This procedure helps to gain insights into tabooed or undesirable aspects of own behaviour or experiences.

In-depth interviews can be usefully combined with behaviour observations. Subsequent to concrete product usage like web performance aspects like user friendliness, attraction and usability can be examined in direct experience coherency.

Our interviewers for the in-depth interviews are deeply psychological trained. They are able to animate the interviewees to talk and to lead the interview to certain topics. Additionally, they can identify hidden motives in some extent to ‘produce’ more relevant material by adroit questions.

Strengths of this method

• The temporal scope of at least 60 up to 120 minutes enables the interviewer to explore also hardly verbalisable or unconscious experiences by certain non-directive question techniques
• There is a mutual trust between the interviewer and the interviewee that enables talking about tabooed or embarrassing aspects during the interview
• Facile rationalities, social wanted or banally superficial answers are scrutinised so that hidden effect coherencies become clearly and that they can be interpreted
• Motives, emotions, prejudices, judgements and oppositions referred to certain brands, products, services or marketing measures can be identified in their coherencies, explored and precisely described

What about the sample size?

Small samples with 10 to 12 interviewees in each target-group are generally sufficiently.

How much time takes the implementation?

A study with a sample size up to 10 attendees can be implemented within 2 to 3 weeks.

Welchen Input müssen Sie leisten?

After the project promise a detailed personal project briefing takes place. We create an interview guide in close coordination with you. In this guide we pre-structure the contents and the questions. Simultaneously, we recruit the test subjects. The recruiting can take place by our ownonline-access-panel as well as by our test subject files, client lists or by cold acquisition by phone.

What do you receive from us?

You receive an interpretative chart report with the following contents:

• Management summary
• Detailed illustration of the results from the monitoring and survey data
• Data interpretation: Identification of the reasons and causes for the ascertained data

On demand we present the results and findings of the test within a moderated workshop.

Do you have any further questions? Please do not hesitate to contact us! We would like to consult you.