An Interview Method for Engaging Personal Data

Journal article

Jimmy Moore, Pascal Goffin, Jason Wiese, Miriah Meyer
Proc. ACM Interact. Mob. Wearable Ubiquitous Technol., vol. 5(4), Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 2021 Dec, pp. 1–28

DOI: 10.1145/3494964

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APA Click to copy
Moore, J., Goffin, P., Wiese, J., & Meyer, M. (2021). An Interview Method for Engaging Personal Data. Proc. ACM Interact. Mob. Wearable Ubiquitous Technol., 5(4), 1–28. https://doi.org/10.1145/3494964

Chicago/Turabian Click to copy
Moore, Jimmy, Pascal Goffin, Jason Wiese, and Miriah Meyer. “An Interview Method for Engaging Personal Data.” Proc. ACM Interact. Mob. Wearable Ubiquitous Technol. 5, no. 4 (December 2021): 1–28.

MLA Click to copy
Moore, Jimmy, et al. “An Interview Method for Engaging Personal Data.” Proc. ACM Interact. Mob. Wearable Ubiquitous Technol., vol. 5, no. 4, Association for Computing Machinery, Dec. 2021, pp. 1–28, doi:10.1145/3494964.

BibTeX Click to copy

@article{moore2021a,
  title = {An Interview Method for Engaging Personal Data},
  year = {2021},
  month = dec,
  address = {New York, NY, USA},
  issue = {4},
  journal = {Proc. ACM Interact. Mob. Wearable Ubiquitous Technol.},
  pages = {1–28},
  publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
  volume = {5},
  doi = {10.1145/3494964},
  author = {Moore, Jimmy and Goffin, Pascal and Wiese, Jason and Meyer, Miriah},
  month_numeric = {12}
}

Whether investigating research questions or designing systems, many researchers and designers need to engage users with their personal data. However, it is difficult to successfully design user-facing tools for interacting with personal data without first understanding what users want to do with their data. Techniques for raw data exploration, sketching, or physicalization can avoid the perils of tool development, but prevent direct analytical access to users’ rich personal data. We present a new method that directly tackles this challenge: the data engagement interview. This interview method incorporates an analyst to provide real-time personal data analysis, granting interview participants the opportunity to directly engage with their data, and interviewers to observe and ask questions throughout this engagement. We describe the method’s development through a case study with asthmatic participants, share insights and guidance from our experience, and report a broad set of insights from these interviews.