Re: [Tails-ux] Intercept interviews from Brazil

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Author: sajolida
Date:  
To: Tails user experience & user interface design
Old-Topics: Re: [Tails-ux] Intercept interviews from Brazil
Subject: Re: [Tails-ux] Intercept interviews from Brazil
intrigeri:
> Bernard Tyers:
>> (First time poster, I've been lurking for a while)
>
> Welcome aboard!


+1!

>> I've noticed in the "intercept interview" definition there isn't
>> a mention of getting participant consent. Is it mentioned
>> somewhere else?
>
>> It's important to get consent from participant when giving specific
>> information about them.
>
>> This is invisible and often overlooked but it is very valuable in
>> building empathy with the interview participant.
>
>> It is the interviewer saying "you, the participant, are in control".
>
> Absolutely. The HOWTO section on
> https://tails.boum.org/blueprint/intercept_interviews/
> reads "You can answer my questions to the extend that you feel
> comfortable and stop at any moment", and before publishing the
> interview we explicitly ask (and wait) for the user's consent.
>
> Please let us know if you think it's not good enough. Rephrasing / new
> sentences would be welcome :)


I added an explicit mention of the word "consent" in the doc with:

https://git-tails.immerda.ch/tails/commit/?id=50b5c7fe201250f692e589dae15e873a14c0cd5b.

>> About specifying detail, when I interview people, unless the detail
>> is important I "fuzz" this kind of detail.
>
>> E.g. instead of saying "Bernard is 28 years old and lives in Brazil"
>> I transcribe "Participant 8 is male, aged 25-30 and lives in a South
>> American country."
>
> OK, thanks for the insight. I'm totally new at this exercise, so I've
> leaned towards not losing data too early (that I might realize later
> is important). But I'm learning, what you're saying makes sense to me,
> and indeed I can't think of good reasons why "28 years old" is very
> useful compared to "25-30", so I'll follow your recommendation next
> time :)
>
> sajolida, if you agree, let me know and I'll make this clear in the
> doc + will edit my first set of interviews accordingly.


I don't have a strong opinion here but I'm happy to get more advice :)

On the one hand making the data more fuzzy can be better for the
interviewee's privacy (though we're getting their consent on what's
published and where) and reduce noise.

On the other hand, have more detail makes it easier to get a mental
picture of the user and build empathy. We're also gathering these
interviews as preliminary work to define personas for the project, so
being able to picture living characters behind the notes can be useful.

>> Also, just curious, what questions did you want to answer with
>> this interview?
>
> Personally, as a developer, I wanted to better understand who is using
> Tails and why. I'm always learning something interesting out of it,
> use cases I had never thought about, issues I was not aware of, etc.
> Given how much I lack such info usually, any bit of (qualitative) data
> is useful.
>
> But I didn't initiate nor design this process myself, so I think
> sajolida can better answer this question :)


Yeap, that's part of the plan:

* Who our users are? What do they do with Tails? Of course, doing such
interviews only give us qualitative data on the small number of users
that we can meet in person, so it's not a good "bit picture" of our user
base.

* What are the most common pain points that people think of when
thinking about Tails? As a way of helping us prioritize work and get an
easier agreement internally when discussing priorities.

As said earlier, I also see this exercise as preliminary work to build
more formal personas and get developers to know more and think more
about our users.

I also thought it would be a good tool for the developers amongst us who
are not so connected to users to read real-life stories of users (and
maybe get to talk with them like intrigeri did). In that sense keeping
the exercise short and easy is important.