Day 83- Bad Bad Interview
Being a student researcher has its own pro and cons. But I believe sometimes cons outweigh the pros. Finding participants for an interview is a struggle.
And even if you are fortunate enough to have enough participants then you need to be ready to take your participants judgements. Being a Gen-z I am allowed to be to offended by at least one thing. I know they say there is no good participant or a bad participant and that is true. But when I was new to this interviewing process, people used to look at me thinking 'Is she going to take an interview?' But I realised you bring professionalism and seriousness to the table. Having the correct documents, following the correct methods, your posture, your language makes it a 'proper' user interview the kind of you have seen on NN group videos.
As Steven Pinker says, We are visual creatures. Visual things stay put, whereas sounds fade.Reading about interviewing process in books is different than watching the actual videos. One helps you get your theory sorted and other helps with practical. But I had high-expectations from myself and the participant while planning user interviews for this project.
Being from an advertising background helped me design an 'eye-catching' poster. I got so-many responses for this. But this one particular person, booked his slot for an interview. I had shared all the ethics documents with him. At the time of the interview, I called him, the participant was not even prepared. He was in his bed with loud TV in the background. The whole interview was a disaster since he didn't understand the concept of the project and by the end of the interview he started asking for money even though in all the ethics documents & advertisement it was clearly mentioned that I am a student and this is a un-paid interview.
I felt extremely demotivated and vulnerable at that moment as a student. All I wanted was some people willing to invest their 30-40 minutes. I didn't even have the privilege of filtering the audience because I barely got 12 responses on that ad. I know struggle is a part of the process but I wish we had some kind of spaces or exposure to the real world where we could recruit participants for our projects. Otherwise its just another make-believe interview with your classmate who pretend to be a real-life target audience.
