57. Maximum Yield—Minimal Time: Successful Strategies for Structured Interviews with the Public to Gain Design Insights

Airport passengers are among the most diverse user groups to study; they come from countless cultural and economic backgrounds and travel for myriad reasons. This alone makes designing for them—be it wayfinding, seats, processes, or technological solutions—no easy feat, but airports and their environments are also innately complex systems. Many commercial companies involved in large-scale surveys such as the airport service quality (ASQ) questionnaire managed by the Airports Council International (ACI), therefore ask rather straightforward questions regarding general satisfaction. However, as designing requires deeper insights into more complex concepts, surveys like these may not be the most suitable option for data collection. Interviews, on the other hand, can deliver the desired depth but require more time and limit the number of participants. This paper reports on how we were able to interview 555 passengers at Singapore Changi Airport within two weeks, yielding quantitative data for discrete choice modeling, as well as rich qualitative data from comments and open-ended questions. Apart from some results as an overview of what kind of data can be collected, the paper focuses on the design and testing of the questionnaire, the training of the interviewers, and the organization and execution of the interviews. It thereby offers promising strategies to get the most yield from structured interviews about the opinions and preferences of an exceptionally heterogeneous user group in a public environment in a very short period of time.