Interview Invitation for helping research

[Anonymous]

Hi all, 

We are a group of researchers from the National University of Singapore, and we are looking for 6 - 10 participants to take part in some interviews regarding users' experience in the help forums. We are hoping to gather results which will further aid us in thinking about innovative solutions to make online help easier and more helpful.  

Each interview will last about an hour and you will receive a USD10 Amazon gift certificate for your time and effort. Interviews will be conducted either over the telephone or on a remote communication tool such as Skype. During the interview, we will ask you a number of questions about your experience in using the forum. 

If you are interested, please provide us with answers to the following questions (as seen below). Kindly attach your answers in an email and send it to part.time.hci@gmail.com. Thereafter, we will contact you shortly by email to book an appointment with you. 

Q1: How long have you been using XXX software application? 

1) Several months - one year

2) one - two years 

3) two - five years

4) more than five years

Q2: What is your expertise in using XXX software applications? 

1) Novice

2) Intermediate 

3) Expert

Q3: How long have you joined this forum? 

Please tell us approximately how many months and years you have joined the forum. 

Q4: How frequently do you visit the forum? 

Everyday

Several times a week

Several times a month

Several times a year

Thank you very much your time and attention. We are highly grateful.

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Best Wishes.

From Nancy

[Anonymous]

Hi, all.

I am so sorry.

About the above four questions.

The "XXX software application" means "AutoCAD 2010".

Thank you very much.

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Best Wishes.

from Nancy

[Charles_Shade · Accepted solution]

Woo Hoo!

1 hour!

10 bucks!

Is this a stimulus funded thing?

No wonder they work for so little over in the far east. They don't pay much!

[rubaiat.habib]

Hmmm... sounds interesting to me! Are you guys trying to improve the forum functionality for these kinds of software?

[Anonymous]

Hi, All.

I am Nancy.

Since there were not many people who respond to my invitation, we have decided to increase our pay to $25 dollars per hour for the interview.

Please understand we are only a research group and this project is not for commercial intention.

So we are really trying to offer you best that we can do.

And we really need your help here.

About the interview, if you don't like the telephone or Skypy, we think a questionnaire by emails will be OK.

It just if we will do this in written format, we probably need to exchange email more than one time for a better understanding about your answers.

We really invite all the forum users with all our resprect. 

And thank you very much for all your attention and reply.

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Best wishes.

from Nancy

[Anonymous]

Hi, all.

Again, in case you will doublt about the legitimacy of our research.

Here I try to provide some more information to let you know what my project is.

My name is Nancy (Xiaole) Kuang (email address: xiaole.kuang@nus.edu.sg).  I am a PhD student in the  department of computer science of National  University of Singapore.

My research area is Human Computer Interaction (http://nus-hci.comp.nus.edu.sg), and my advisor is Shengdong Zhao (http://www.comp.nus.edu.sg/~zhaosd). His email address is zhaosd@comp.nus.edu.sg.

We  haven't created a web page for this project yet, since our research  result hasn't been published yet. The purpose of the project is to  study the communication process in the forum and look for  possibilities  to improve the forums in the future.

We know that software learning is  a complex and tedious task. It often cost someone years to  master a  complex software application like AutocCAD. When people meet  problems, there aren't many good choices for them to look for help. Online forum is one important channel for people to look for help, but   it has some problems and can be improved. For now, we try to figure out what difficulites you have when you are looking for help using forum.

So basically, the interview is  just for getting the forum users' real motivation about posting all  questions, or replying to others.

The questions in the interview should be just like:

"What were the last 5 problems you have encountered while you are using Photoshop?"

"Will you come back to check your own post after you post it?"

...

Some questions like that.

I hope I make it clear this time.

And please contact me if you still have any confusion about it.

Thank you very much for your time.

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Best Wishes

from Nancy