Interviews and Questionnaires

If you follow a certain type of prototyping method - for example wizard of ozing - you need to communicate with your users and gather information about how their experience was. Needless to say, you do that by using questionnaires and interviews.

There are a lot of ways you can create a questionnaire - and many online services help you analyze and visualize the data; or you can do it manually and use excel to do just that. The important part here is that you gather information about things that are important to the development and goals of your game. For example, if it doesn’t matter what gender your users have, don’t ask that question – and conversely if it is important to know how various demographics experience your game, then you may want to ask the users about their age and gender. One important thing to note is that, although surveys can provide us with solid, quantitative data about the performance and experience of our game, they cannot really capture a high resolution picture of the experience on their own. That is why they are almost always more useful in combination with interviews. That is also true in the case of interviews; they are great, but they are somewhat incomplete on their own.

Interviews are usually divided into 3 types: unstructured, semi-structured, and structured. As the names suggest, each of these types has a degree of freedom and depending on our goals for the evaluation, we may use any of them. An unstructured interview can be more like a friendly chat about the game where you are just spontaneously asking questions about the experience. These types of interviews are good as they may uncover things that you never thought of - but they are also quite likely to end up giving you an incoherent and noisy set of insights.

On the other hand, structured interviews refer to the type of interview where you have very specific questions that you ask of the users about their experience; these interviews are very rigid and narrow, hence they may be useful if you are interested in a very specific thing. Naturally, structured interviews lack the type of freedom that can lead to new discussions and insights that are completely out of the box.

Finally, semi-structured interviews are the kind of interviews where you know you have a specific question that you ask, and when the user answers that question, you ask some follow-up questions and let them explain and express their thoughts and emotions relatively freely. In these interviews, you still keep to the general track that you have predetermined but you also allow deviation from it if something interesting comes up.

In general, semi-structured interviews are probably the best types of interviews as long as you can keep track of time, and can entertain an open, and friendly discussion about the subject-matter. A pro tip for your interviews is to ask this type of question: “how/what would you do/want if it was magic” - where you are actually asking the user to forget about any possible constraints and tell you what they would truly want from the experience.

By the way, do not forget to provide your test subjects with some candy, tea, coffee and such! Be nice to them!