Assessment Task: Interviewing Customers

You can use the resources on the previous pages to help with your interviewing style. You've also had plenty of opportunity in class to practice your interviewing technique.

It might be useful to consider the following tips before conducting your interviews:

• Remember it is a conversation. You need to give the person time to explain their thoughts and ideas; you also need to listen to them carefully so your follow up questions make sense.
• You should avoid interviewing close friends and family - you need the interviewee to give you unbiased answers.
• There are no right or wrong answers for this task - we are trying to understand the real life experiences that people have with hairdressers.
• Do not try to anticipate their responses or create your own ideas. The information in your notes must come from the interviewee - if you need to, you can always ask more questions to get a better understanding of what they are saying.
• The five "questions" are more discussion points. Don't just read the question and move on to the next - you will need to ask follow up questions or change your approach based on their responses.
• Read the prompts and notes for each discussion point to help you better understand the information you need for each point.
• Use the interview guide to take simple notes that you can use to prompt you during the interview. It can be useful to use paper copies for this (computers can seem a little rude).
• You must do the interview with spoken words - you cannot do a webchat interview. Face to face is best, but if you must, a phone or video call is acceptable.
• Record the interviews (audio only) so that you can listen to them afterwards and create more detailed notes. This way you can focus on the person and the conversation.
• You can interview in any language (whatever is best for you) but you will need to share the notes (using a Google Form) in English.