In this video, we'll be talking about how to conduct interviews for User Needs Assessment, and specifically a certain kind of interview called the Semi-structured Interview. Now, there are many different kinds of interviews. You can do interviews in groups, as in a focus group or with individuals. You can do interviews remotely, over the phone or possibly over video teleconferencing, and you can also do interviews of course in person. Then there are different kinds of interviews. There are structured interviews, which are really surveys or questionnaires. There are Semi-structured interviews, which we'll talk about more in a second, and there are unstructured interviews. These are interviews in which there's almost no structure to the interview and you have a free-form conversation. So, what we will be doing is actually focusing particularly on in-person interviews that you conducted with individuals, in a Semi-structured way. Semi-structured interviews, means that you're balancing what you already know about the situation, about the product or service, with an open free form discussion so that you're able to hear things that you might not be able to anticipate. In fact, that is exactly the point of User Needs Assessment, is to hear things that you haven't already anticipated. Most Semi-structured interviews involve some kind of script or what's called an interview protocol, where you have a list of questions that you use as a guideline for the interview, even though you won't actually follow them strictly. What you want to do is encourage a conversational style between you the interviewer, and the person who's being interviewed, and because it's meant to be free-form you should expect to go off script very often. The kinds of things you should think about when you're conducting Semi-structured interviews for Needs Assessment is first of all, who will you interview? This is something that you've already thought about but you want people who are users or potential users of a product or service. You also want to choose people who might be considered typical members of the group that you're interested in. So, you don't want people who are extreme users, maybe just a small proportion of the overall user base, unless that's what you're especially interested in designing for. You also want to conduct the interview in a location where people feel comfortable and where they normally use that product or service. Similarly, in terms of the time, you want to choose a time that's convenient for the person who's being interviewed and again in a time when they would normally use that product or service. In the next couple of videos we will talk a little bit more about what exactly goes into an interview protocol, as well as how to design an interview protocol so that when you actually give the interview you're most likely to get the responses that you like.