Project Nessa — User Interviews

Somehow I thought that it will be easy to gather targets for interviews from the community - it should’ve been easy. I have all day, it’s summer… oh, wait. This stage is quite pricey if measured in time.

But fun. Really. If you enjoy your preconceptions cracked and tumbled.

According to my freshly learned information about “how to conduct user interviews” I prepared some preliminary questions then headed to some of my app user friends.

The outline of the interview was the following:

• Pre-stuff: what’s this, privacy/ confidentiality, can I record you, etc.
• When did you use this app last, and how did you do it?
• Specific questions, if the were not mentioned:
• How do you ask others to dance? How do you answer them, what strategies do you have?
• What is the importance of the music, how do you deal with it? Prioritisation?
• What do you think about refusals, would you, do you, and how?
• What is important when you ask other to dance?
• Then I show them the actual app (running on a virtual machine on may laptop), and I ask them to perform the usual thing with the dance-card app, while they talk to me about it.
• The ending part was entirely based on the interview themes, I usually asked them about the most interesting findings, tried to confirm some emerging questions.

During the interviews I made notes on paper as I didn’t trust the efficiency of the voice recording but later I listened to the recording and realised next time I may as well be brave and focus more on the subjects of the interview.

As I interviewed friends, the process itself was easy and without real embarrassment though there were some topics that could’ve been more touchy.

Results

Based on my notes and the recordings I made post-it notes of everything noteworthy, then arranged them together, in several iterations, to reach some conclusion about the matter at hand.

I wont list here everything, only the most interesting topics — those, that presented new ideas to me or new perspectives about the app.

The users* want to:

• make the best pairing with dances and people in their list (efficiency)
• avoid social missteps (security)
• have control over their dance list (control) — be able to delete dances, follow up the status of the arrangements, get and give feedback
• do everything necessary in the app, not outside (contained)
• have a pleasant time with the app (#aesthetics #fun)

*later I will differentiate between them but for now these were my main observations about my interview subjects

Asking out others needs bravery, and the users don’t want to make socially inapt moves.

Although the most efficient method to dance is asking out others, there many obstacles to it: who to ask, is it a burden to them to make them use the app, do they prefer to be the initiators instead of just answering the calls?

For women it is more of a problem, of course, some of them wouldn’t not ask out anyone.

For those people who ask out others to dance it is important to gather information about the available people. During the searching the app now only shows them their friends, and later it gives information about if they already RSVP-d to the event. They can’t search between the users (those who already made arrangements), so they have to invent other methods — asking them outside of the app, clicking through some available peoples dance-list to see who are the others in them.

It would be useful to indicate the users’ preferences, which gender they prefer to dance, which dances they are able to dance at all — make some kind of user profile.

Refusing someone is a burden

Built in comments would ease the social anxiety of it, as the users could propose another dance or at least some reason for the refusal.

Ignoring is a tactical act

… because it gives time some other, more wanted call.

Notifications for any change are very important

And in the current application they are insufficient. For every change in the status of dances they should be a working notification, otherwise the process won’t work.

Comments / different states for the dances would help the process

There are dances that the user hates, there are those she prefers and it would be useful to indicate it to others, too.

There were comments about the aesthetics of the app (“Ugly!”), the texts (“Quite spartan!”), and an overall feeling that there are too much steps in it.

I still have to discuss the findings with my team (who are on holiday at the moment), and make some decisions about what kind of new features are needed based on them. Until then I read about personas and create them as a next step.