Interviews and Questionnaires

If you follow a certain type of prototyping method, you need to communicate with users and gather feedback about their experience. This is typically done through questionnaires and interviews.

There are many ways to create a questionnaire, from online services that analyze and visualize data to manual methods using Excel. The key is to gather relevant information for your game's development and goals. For example, if user gender doesn’t matter, don’t ask; but if demographics impact experience, consider asking about age and gender.

While surveys provide quantitative data, they lack depth and are best used with interviews. Similarly, interviews alone offer insights but are incomplete without supporting data.

Interviews are usually divided into 3 types: unstructured, semi-structured, and structured. As the names suggest, each of these types has a degree of freedom and depending on our goals for the evaluation, we may use any of them.

In general, semi-structured interviews are the best, as long as you manage time well and foster an open, friendly discussion. Ask How/what would you do/want if it was magic? this encourages users to ignore constraints and share their ideal experience.