11/36 - User Interviews Deep Drive
Whoever understands the customer best wins
What are User Interviews
User interviews are qualitative, research methods designed to better understand those who interact with your company, products, or services.
Researchers will select and interview one user (a target audience member who interacts with your company to achieve their goals) and find out about their views on a topic by asking questions and recording the responses.
Unlike focus groups, research interviews are one-to-one and can take place in person, over a video call, or via a telephone call.
User interviews can be used to find out about:
Beliefs
Likes and dislikes
As well as the above, the interview questions can explore a user’s immediate reaction to a stimulus or gain their reasoning as to why they would act in a certain way.
And by taking a semi-structured or structured approach to user interviews, researchers can quickly and easily obtain user experience insights to help improve products and services.
Why Do User Interviews?
Interviews give insights into what users think about a site, an application, a product, or a process. They can point out what site content is memorable, what people feel is important on the site, and what ideas for improvement they may have. They can be done in a variety of situations:
before you have a design, to inform personas, journey maps, feature ideas, workflow ideas
to enrich a contextual inquiry study by supplementing observation with descriptions of tools, processes, bottlenecks, and how users perceive them
at the end of a usability test, to collect verbal responses related to observed behaviors
(Do defer the interview until after the behavioral observation segment of the usability study: if you ask questions before the participant tries to perform tasks with your design, you will have primed the user to pay special attention to whatever features or issues you asked about.)
3 common examples of why people do customer interviews
To demonstrate the purpose and importance of customer interviews, let’s walk through three examples of why people do customer interviews:
To know whether or not people will like (and buy) a new product
To know if customers like design changes or new features
To get to know customers better, just generally
… and how customer interviews can have an impact on each.
1. To know if people will like (and buy) a new product.
Ah, product/market fit—the marker many startups live and die by.
Finding product-market fit (a process also referred to as customer development by The Lean Startup) can be tricky, but it’s incredibly important if you want to build a successful product. It’s all about questioning the fundamental assumptions you have about your customers and validating (or debunking) your ideas through research.
Now, some of you might be thinking: I’ve barely got my foot into the prototyping stage of product development. I don’t even have a product, let alone paying customers to talk to. Wouldn’t customer interviews be a waste of time?
Absolutely not—interviewing customers (or potential customers) is no less important for early-stage startups as it is for mid-level and enterprise companies. You’ll save money in the long run by validating your ideas from the start, instead of building something no one wants.
2. To know if customers like design changes or new features.
Great! It’s always good to make sure your ideas are what the customer wants, not just what you and your team are excited to see. These kinds of studies are the most common for people doing customer interviews.
Interviews like these can happen in the discovery phase—before you’ve developed the feature or implemented the new design—as well as the testing phase and post-release phases. When you do these interviews depends on what you’re trying to accomplish. For example, if you’re not sure whether or not customers will want a new feature in the first place, you’ll want to do them during the discovery phase, but if you know customers want the feature, then you can interview them to see whether or not the feature you built meets their needs during the testing phase.
For example, Intuit, the company behind products like TurboTax and Quickbooks, has a rigorous process of customer development research. They regularly conduct “follow-me-home” interviews with customers. The point of these interviews is to observe customers in their own environments—a method akin to ethnographic research—to give Intuit employees a better understanding of their day-to-day lives.
During these interviews, the Intuit team realized a lot of their customers were freelancers, or a part of the gig economy. These insights played a big part in creating what is now Quickbooks Self-Employed. During another round of customer interviews, they learned that a lot of customers had a difficult time separating work and personal expenses in the product. To solve this, they implemented a simple swipe system that allows customers to mark expenses as they come in on their mobile phone.
In the following video, Hugh Molotsi, who spent 22 years in product success at Intuit, explains how they use customer interviews to validate ideas:
3. I want to get to know my customers better, just generally.
Customer interviews are important even when you don’t have anything specific to test or investigate.
At the end of the day, your customers are people—dynamic, complicated, and sometimes unpredictable people. Their needs, desires, and relationship to your product are almost guaranteed to change over time. By conducting continuous customer research, you can keep track of these changes and adapt your business accordingly to maintain long-term customer engagement.
Continuous customer research can take the form of office hours (where you block off time on your schedule every few weeks to chat with customers about their experiences) or more formalized studies. Either way, customer interviews provide open, flexible, and regular opportunities to connect with your customers and learn more about what’s delighting or frustrating them.
When to conduct a user interview
While user interviews can be helpful during any phase of the product development process, there are three particular times when interviews are especially valuable. These times are:
At the beginning of a project, before a clear concept has been defined. You interview people to get a better understanding of your potential users and their wants and needs. The information you collect during the interview will help you start thinking of a solution.
During the early stages of product development. When a product team has an early model of their concept, showing it to users can provide valuable feedback.
After the product has shipped. Interviews can be conducted in combination with observation. Such interviews are called a contextual inquiry, and are conducted in the context of using a product. These give users an opportunity to show you how they interact with your product.
What are the advantages of user interviews?
As well as the points mentioned above, the main benefits of using user interviews as a user research method are that these interviews can be quick and cheap to do.
Using digital tools and end-to-end software, data can be collected and analysed using integrated dashboards, helping researchers to keep organised and find results faster. New data can be uploaded in real-time to help guide new strategies and changes, resulting in a proactive — not reactive approach to user experience.
Lastly, user interviews are simple to conduct. Whether they are structured interviews or semi-structured interviews, all that needs to be done is form questions ahead of time, interview a user and record their answers. No special training is required.
What are the disadvantages of user interviews?
Interviewers need to be able to remember and recall user answers accurately to understand the attitudinal information being received. However, researchers may recall an answer incorrectly, which could impact the accuracy of the result.
Bias is another challenge in face-to-face interviews. As the user is aware of the researcher’s presence, they could feel embarrassed or decide to be agreeable in their answers, leading to acquiescence bias. Likewise, the interviewer can also interpret answers and bias their own recall.
If interviewers make notes during the interview, their attention will be diverted and they could miss some vital user insights. The jotting down of notes could distract the user or make them feel uncomfortable speaking.
Asking users about their thoughts on how a product can be used in the future is also fruitless as it asks the user to speculate beyond their knowledge. The same is true for design questions about a product or service. Users are not familiar with design processes so their responses won’t give accurate reasons why a design should be changed from one version to another. In these cases, watching the user’s behaviour with a designed solution will help researchers understand if the new design worked.
Sample size is also limited to the size of your interviewing staff, the area in which interviews are conducted and the number of qualified respondents in the area. You may have to conduct your interview across multiple areas to get the quantity and quality of data you are looking for.
How to conduct a user interview
There are three steps in the interview process: preparation for the interview, conducting the interview, and analyzing results after the interview. Below, we look at how you should conduct each step of a successful, insightful interview.
Before the interview Some people believe that conducting an interview is just like having a conversation with other people and that it doesn’t require a lot of preparation. But while interviews obviously share similarities with everyday conversations, a good interview requires significant preparation. Otherwise, your chances of getting valuable insights are limited.
Below are the six things you should prepare before conducting a user interview.
Set a clear goal It’s crucial to start each new interview project with a clear understanding of the purpose of your research. It’s vital that you know why you want to conduct the interviews and what you want to get out of them. For example, you might want to learn why 50 percent of users who reached the product checkout phase in your e-commerce app abandon the checkout flow.
The following questions will help you formulate a goal for your interviews.
What do I need to know about our users to make our app better?
How will that knowledge inform our design process?
Tip: Involve the key stakeholders in the process of defining a purpose for your research. You’ll add more weight to this activity by getting buy-in from them.
Make sure the interview is the right tool for the problem you want to solve
Interviews are not a universal answer to all design challenges. It’s vital to know when an interview will work best and when it’s better to use other tools. For example, an interview might not be the best tool for finding what color scheme you should choose for your app. It’s much better to use user testing for this purpose.
Decide who to recruit Recruitment is a vital part of the interview process. It’s essential to recruit a representative sample of your target audience. Start with your user personas and try to find interview participants that match them. Decide whether you want to have only one particular group of users or users from many different groups. When it comes to the number of people you should interview, there are no hard and fast rules. You can apply the principle established by Jakob Nielsen for usability testing, and start out by interviewing five participants. If you notice that by participant number five you’ve stopped getting any new insights, you probably don’t need to recruit any more participants.
Design your interview questions If you want just one piece of advice for your interview, this is it: don’t start an interview without a prepared discussion guide. A discussion guide is a document in which you formulate the questions you want to ask your participants. Your discussion guide should be closely tied to the purpose of your research, and the questions should be selected according to your learning goal.
"If you want just one piece of advice for your interview, this is it: don’t start an interview without a prepared discussion guide."
At the same time, just because you have a discussion guide doesn’t mean you need to ask all of the questions in it during the interview. Think of it more like a reference document, a “skeleton” for your discussion, rather than a script. During the interviews, the guide should serve as a reminder of the questions you want to ask or topics you want to cover.
Discussion guides typically consist of two types of questions—general and product-specific.
General questions are questions you ask during the introduction part. These might include:
Could you tell me about your habits?
What apps/websites do you use on a regular basis?
Product-specific questions are focused on getting specific details about user behavior. These questions might include:
What’s the hardest part of [the task]?
What can we do to make [the task] easier?
Keep the following tips in mind when preparing a question script:
Keep the script reasonably short. Write down all your questions and read them out loud. If it takes more than ten minutes to read through them, your script is too long, and you need to cut it down.
Write clear questions. Don’t use terms in your questions that might be unfamiliar to the user.
Avoid long questions. The questions you ask should be relatively brief and easy to understand. People can’t retain a lot of information in their short-term memory, so avoid long sentences with a lot of details.
Don’t ask questions about the future. When you ask questions like, “When we release [product] on the market, will you purchase it?”, people are likely to say yes just to make you feel good. In reality, they simply don’t have any idea.
Test your discussion guide. Conduct a trial run for your interview with one of your peers, and ask them the questions from your guide. This will help you understand whether or not you can get valuable insights based on the answers you get.
Iterate your discussion guide. Refine the guide based on results of real interview sessions.
Create a good environment When it comes to in-person interviews, the physical space you choose to use for the interview will have a direct impact on the results of your interview session. People often behave according to their environment. Just imagine an empty room with white walls, two chairs, a table, and a mirrored wall which shields the observers on the other side. Such a room looks more like a place for interrogations rather than a place for discussions. It will be hard for an interviewee to relax in such an environment.
Don’t conduct the interview alone It’s best to conduct an interview with a partner. There are three significant benefits of having two people facilitating the interview together:
Distribute responsibilities. One person can ask questions while the other takes notes.
Support each other in real time. The person who takes notes can also think about any questions that the first person forgot to ask, and remind them about it.
Gain even more valuable insights. When two people conduct an interview together, they can share and discuss their thoughts and impressions after the interview.
Step 2: During the interview
Once you’ve prepared, the next step is to ensure that the actual user interview goes according to plan. Below are 14 steps to take to ensure that you get the valuable insights you’re looking for.
Put yourself in a positive mood Before you step into the meeting room, take a deep breath and smile. It’s a proven fact that smiling creates a more positive attitude, and since positive attitudes are contagious, your interviewee will likely feel better, too.
Stick to the semi-structured interview format When it comes to selecting a format for interviewing people, there are two extremes:
Completely structured interviews. This is an interview where all questions are prescripted. Such interviews look very much like a survey.
Completely unstructured interviews. This is an open dialog between people, and which rarely brings valuable insights. As Steve Portigal, author of the book Interviewing Users says, “To learn something new requires interviewing, not just chatting.”
Semi-structured interviews lie between the two extremes. They’re a type of interview where you prepare a set of topics you want to cover (recorded in your discussion guide), but where you can change the order of questions depending on how the conversation evolves.
The semi-structured interview approach has two significant advantages:
It feels natural to people. Unlike a scripted interview, the semi-structured interview doesn’t create the feeling of a police interview.
Flexibility for topic flow. It gives the interviewer an opportunity to explore topics that they had not previously thought relevant. It’s possible to gain additional valuable insights by elaborating on answers and asking follow-up questions.
Build rapport with interviewee The quality of the interview will suffer if you aren’t able to put the interviewee at ease and earn their confidence. That’s why your goal at the beginning of an interview is to make the interviewee feel comfortable. It’s not that hard to achieve this goal. Here’s what you need to do:
Make them feel welcome. Greet your interviewee by name, offer them a drink, and initiate friendly small talk before moving to the main topic of discussion.
Learn a little bit about the interviewee. Ask questions like, “Can you tell me about yourself,” and let them freely talk about their background, lifestyle, or technology habits. Such questions are both ice-breakers and a great way to get some context about your interviewees. The information you get might be helpful for the future analysis.
Use positive body language. Use non-verbal cues to make them feel comfortable, such as maintaining eye contact and smiling. Watch your body language for negative cues, such as fidgeting or crossing your arms.
Explain the purpose of the interview. Describe what you are trying to achieve and explain how you plan to use the results. The point of this is to give the interviewee more context about why you want to speak to them, and what sort of questions they might be asked so they don’t feel confused during the interview.
Keep it about the product. Make sure the interviewee doesn’t feel like they’re being tested in any way. If you plan to test a prototype of a product during the interview, make it clear to the interviewee that you're testing the prototype, not them.
Resist the urge to judge or educate your interviewee The foundation for conducting a good interview is to keep an open mind and be truly curious about the participant’s perspective. Your interviewees are there to teach you something, not the other way around! It’s counterproductive to judge your interviewee or try to educate them during the interview. You have a limited amount of time for the session (usually, no more than one hour) and your goal is to use it effectively. Elicit as much information as you can during this time.
Ask permission before audio or video recording While the most common form of data collection during interviews is note taking, audio or video recording can also be an excellent way to collect information. Of course, any time you want to record your participants you need to ensure that they are okay with that. Always ask for permission before starting the recording, and be ready to abandon it at any point during your interview if your interviewee feels uncomfortable.
Start off with the easy questions Start each interview session with simple questions. These might be three to five lightweight questions from the general section of your discussion guide that you ask before moving to the main topics you want to cover.
Such questions are intended to act as a warm-up for the interviewee, and make it easier for the interviewer to create a connection. But make sure that the questions are relevant to the broader theme of the session.
Prioritize open-ended questions Open-ended questions allow the interviewee to respond in their own words and allow them to share richer, qualitative details. Closed-ended questions can be answered with a simple “yes” or “no.” It’s hard to imagine any great discussion that only consists of closed-ended questions. You’ll have a better chance of getting valuable insights by asking open-ended questions. Such questions start with who, what, when, where, why, and how.
Here are a couple of examples to help get you started:
What was your experience with [product]?
Where did you get stuck?
How would [product] fit into your workflow?
Who did you turn to when you needed help? Why?
Ask follow-up questions Don’t settle for the first answer you get. Always try to dig deeper to understand the interviewee’s point of view. Try to ask follow-up questions when users describe a particular case or problem.
Use the critical incident method It's a well-known fact that people are really bad at recalling situations that happened in the past. Human memory is fallible, and people are notorious for adding details to make the story more compelling. But when you need to collect accurate information about user experience, the critical incident method can help.
The critical incident method is to ask users to recall a specific situation from the past in which they faced a terrible or excellent experience. Unlike general situations from the past that the user might easily forget, the extreme cases are often more vivid in users' minds, meaning they can remember some specifics that will be valuable for you. This is why the critical incident method is especially great for exploratory interviews.
Avoid leading questions Leading questions are questions that frame the interviewee’s mind around a particular answer. It’s essential to avoid or at least minimize the number of leading questions you ask, otherwise the results of your interview sessions will be too biased and you’ll hear only what you want to hear.
“How often do you watch Netflix?” is an example of a leading question. By asking such a question, you assume as fact that your interviewee is an active Netflix user. It’s much better to ask questions in a neutral manner.
So, if you want to know about user preferences regarding video streaming services, you can start with asking a question like, “Do you have any experience with any video streaming services?”
Clarify interviewee responses in real time When you’re not quite sure what an interviewee is talking about, ask them for a clarification. Don’t leave clarification questions to the end of the user interview session, because it’ll be hard to recreate the original context. Don’t be afraid to ask interviewees to elaborate on their responses. This pairs well with asking follow up questions.
Minimize note-taking Written notes are one of the common artifacts we get from an interview session, and they are extremely valuable in analyzing the results of an interview. So it might sound strange to suggest minimizing your note taking. But there’s a good reason for it—it’s almost impossible to pay full attention to your interviewee and take notes at the same time.
If you ask questions and take notes at the same time, there’s a good chance that you’ll have a hard time managing the interview. Also, when you focus too much on note taking, such behavior creates a strong sense of an authority interview, not a regular conversation. Try to note only the most important information or questions you want to ask for further analysis. This is why it’s a great idea to have an interview partner taking notes and managing any recording devices while the other person is conducting the interview.
Don’t be afraid of silence When you conduct an interview, try not to fear silent pauses in the conversation. It’s natural for people to fill the silence with words, but don’t fall into the trap of trying to fill the pauses yourself. Instead, give the interviewee the opportunity to provide additional information.
Finish with a wrap-up summary At the end of the interview, you should give your respondent a sense of closure. Don’t just stop the conversation abruptly when you reach the last question in your interview guide. Instead, give an interviewee an opportunity to ask questions. After that, thank your interviewees for taking their time.
Step 3: After the interview
Once you’ve completed your interview, it’s time to analyze your responses. This is when the insights from your interviewees will become especially clear. Below are three steps you need to take.
Conduct a retrospective Ideally, after each interview you conduct, try to reflect on how well you managed it and what you can do to improve the quality of your interviews in the future.
Structure the information The next step is to analyze what your users have told you. You’ll probably have a massive amount of data—dozens of notes, video recordings, and personal impressions. Most of this data will be qualitative rather than quantitative. As a result, it might feel overwhelming.
Hopefully, two common tools can help you structure the data:
A report with specific sections. The goals you stated at the beginning of your user interview project and the discussion guide you prepared can be good foundations for your reports—they will help you filter through the key data.
Mind maps. This type of diagram can help you structure and present your data in a visual and easily accessible format. It can help you to quickly identify links between topics and spot connections that may not have been obvious before.
Combine interviews with other techniques After analyzing the interview results, you might feel like you have a pretty good understanding of what you need to do with your product, and it might be tempting to start implementing your insights right away. But it’s better to resist this temptation, because it’s essential to first validate your results.
The great thing about user interviews is that they can be combined with other research methods, such as usability testing or user surveys. By combining interviews with other techniques, you’ll be able to either validate or disprove your hypothesis while also gaining additional insights about your objective results.
Free User interview Guide
Minimising note-taking was an unlock for me too. I reviewed my last ~30 interviews recently and found I was missing so much at the time of the interview because I was taking copious notes. It’s stupid. Record the interview, engage with your interviewee like a human, and take notes after!