Using Interviews to Understand your Clients Needs
The most important thing to remember when conducting interviews is to remain polite and courteous at all times! Most people dislike interviews, so make sure your client is as comfortable as possible! Why are you conducting interviews if you are interested in Web Development? Interviews are one method to help Collect the Information you Need in order to Start that Big Development Project.
Where do you begin? Well if you are at this point, that means the client has already made a request for a job that is needed or a project that must be developed. Go back to this initial request and come up with questions which will help you better understand exactly what the client is asking for.
What types of questions should you ask? If you are still in the earlier stages of development, the best questions to ask are open-ended questions because they can help you get very rich information from your client. Open-ended questions are those which require more than a yes/no response. These types of questions require the user to think for a moment in order to then provide a detailed response. For example, “Can you describe the main service you would like your website to offer your customers?”
If you are in the later stages of development, you already have assembled a clear idea of what the application should do and what it should be like. Interviews done at this stage should therefore use closed-ended questions in order to answer very specific questions. Closed-ended questions are those which can be answered with a simple yes/no, true/false or multiple choice selection which give a definite response to a question. For example, “Should the page layout expand to fit the screen or be limited to a size of 800×600?”
When interviewing people prior to developing a project, make sure you let them know the purpose of the interview. If you Understand the Work Domain, then you will realize that different stakeholders may have different feelings towards you as a developer than others. For example, some people that you need to interview may feel that the application you are creating will replace them and put them out of work. These users may therefore be hostile towards you and might be unwilling to be helpful. It is therefore important to make sure you are honest with everyone and let them know exactly what is going on, what you are developing, and why you need to interview them.
At the end of the interview, don’t just send the people out the door and on their way. Wrap-up by sharing your own thoughts about how you think the interview went. Tell those you interview what you think you discovered based on what they told you and ask them if your understanding is correct. Also let them know what you were unable to discover and see if they know who might be able to provide this information giving you a hint as to whom you should interview next!
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