A for Semi - Structured Interviewing User - Centered Design

An obvious, but critical, ingredient of user-centered design of software applications is for designers to gain a thorough understanding of potential users’ work (including its surrounding context) which an intended application will support. This involves observing potential users and interviewing them about their work. The goal is to produce a descriptive model of current work practice that can be used to guide further design activities (e.g., how the worker will become more productive through introduction of a new or improved computer support application). In order to make that process more efficient, I have developed the semi-structured interviewing techniques described here. The techniques are adaptations of methods used by ethnographers [15, 16] and those used by cognitive scientists [4], and are based on previous work that my colleagues and I have done on knowledge elicitation for knowledge-based (expert) systems [5, 18]. A for Semi-Structured Interviewing