On-Site Interviews, also known as Ethnographic Interviews, means I conduct research in environments that provide a context we want to explore, whether it’s a kitchen, an office, a job-site, a restaurant, a teenager’s room, a beach …

Benefits of On-Site Interviewing:

• Learn more about what drives a person.
• Obtain an overview or big picture understanding of a category.
• Understand behavioral nuances about product usage that aren’t as easy for respondents to report in a focus group discussion, but ca easily be observed, questioned, and detailed by watching them actually doing it.
• Explore misperceptions or gain clarification of reported behaviors that don’t necessarily align with expectation.
• Identify unmet needs.

All of these objectives can benefit by interviewing someone within their own world, getting closer to their experiences, using their artifacts and surroundings as starting points for discussion and as cues for helping them remember.

According to Nina Richman of S.C. Johnson, Idea Exchange On-Site Interviews provided her team:

• Greater depth, yielding more richness of learning
• Greater familiarity in the target’s own environment, which breeds more realistic, less superficial responses
• Less editing of behaviors and a greater chance of discovering contradictions
• More impactful impressions for marketing folks