Sample script:

Establishing the behavioral and motivational context

Previous experiences

Now I’d like to talk about your last three vacations. Can you tell me about them?

Where did you go? What was it like? How did you get there? What kind of hotel or resort did you stay in? What was it like inside? Outside?

Please describe your room or suite in detail. How much did the room or suite cost?

Overall approach

When you think about taking a vacation, what do you think about first?

What are your favorite types of vacation? How do you go about planning them?

What is your approach for selecting one hotel or resort over another?

If prompting needed: For example, leisure, fun activities, mix with other people, be alone, beach, mountains, woods, water sports?

If you had to select one of these basic approaches to selecting a resort, which would you say you focus on most?

-       Luxurious sparkle

-       The time of my life

-       Unique experiences

-       Rejuvenation, R&R

-       Meet interesting people

-       Good times for good value

Where would you like to go, but haven’t yet had the time or resources to go there?

Is the choice of location and resort yours alone, or is it shared with someone else?

If shared: What is your role in terms of selecting the hotel or resort and location?

Information resources

When you were planning the trips, how did you find out about the places you would stay? What resources did you use?

Probe for comprehensive list.

What other resorts did you read about but didn’t go to? Why not?

4. Summarize motivation

As time permits, restate the approach in terms of steps

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Another method for discovering motivations is to use a Likert scale. [xxx example Likert scale questions.] Likert scales in an interview setting can be used to understand the motivations of the individual participant, which may also help understand a composite user archetype. The scales can be used to compare and contrast different participants. But they can’t be used in the interview context to generate conclusions about the larger population of users. That would be crossing over from qualitative data capture to quantitative data reporting, which is never a reliable approach.

Photo elicitation

Photo-elicitation is an interview technique in which participants are shown a series of images, and they are asked to comment on those images. The images may be photos that the participant has brought or that have been assembled by the research team. They may have been created as part of the research process, for example the participant may have been asked to create them as homework in preparation for the interview. Or, they may have been existing photos that were assembled for the interview, for example collected by the research team from a stock photo web site as illustrations of a concept related to the research topic. In a photo-elicitation exercise, the researcher shows participants a series of images and asks them to comment on them, possibly asking questions that lead the participant to talk about specific topics related to the research.

Sample script: Photo-elicitation for resort booking system

What is the first thing that comes to mind when you see these images?

Show series of resort photos from brochures and web site.

Show series of photos of people on vacation from stock photo site.

When customer responds positively to an image: What are some words you would use to describe how you would feel if you were part of this scene?

Copyright 2009, Paul Bryan, Usography Corporation (www.usography.com)

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