A practical guide to conducting user interviews

In the past years, I have done dozens of user interviews. Before then I used to do other UX research methods. but since I embraced conducting user interviews in my UX work, I have seen a tremendous change in my outcomes. User interviews are the best (and perhaps the only) way to understand your users, empathize with them and understand their needs. Not only that but also if you manage to ask the right questions, you will discover new business ideas and potential opportunities for your product that none of your competitors have.

This article is a summary of tens of articles and books I have read, and of my personal experience with conducting user interviews. In this article, I will try to be as practical as possible. You will get clear and detailed tips about every stage of conducting user interviews so you can start doing user interviews from tomorrow. I will assume that you already know what user interviews are and I will jump right away into the important questions.

Why to conduct user interviews?

I have seen that a lot. A group of cool guys gathered to build the next big thing, so they hired a UI/UX/graphic designer to build fancy UI screens and a bunch of developers to turn those screens into a real app and they end up building something nobody wants. User interviews bridge the gap between you and your user needs. it gets you and your team arguing over real data instead of what they think users want. User interviews are the best way to gain actionable and testable insights not only by asking but also by observing user’s behaviors, words, facial expressions, and the environment around him or her. According to a study undertaken by Forrester, on average, every dollar invested in UX brings 100 dollars in return, that’s an ROI of an impressive 9,900 percent and the study clearly mentioned that observing customers Interactions with your product is the first step towards good UX design

“A field visit tells you if you’re designing the right thing. A usability test tells you if you’ve designed the thing right — Think like a UX researcher book”

When to conduct user interviews?

The simple and short answer to this question is whenever you feel you need it, and a more specific answer, if we are going to divide the product life cycle into 3 phases then the answer would be the following:

Ideation and research phase:

• To gather data, understand your users, build persona or validate business assumptions.

Product design and development phase:

• To test your prototype and ensure that you have a truly relevant solution.
• To gather more data about your customers or know more about a particular insight from round 1 research.
• To test your user flows and journey maps.

Release phase:

• To conduct usability testing or seeking for enhancing to your product.
• To know the ROI of investing in your research (Besides UX analytics )

How to conduct user interviews?

1.Before the Interview

Defining Research objective

Why would you conduct user interviews? If you don’t have a clear and precise answer to this question then none of the upcoming makes sense. The research objective is usually 3 to 4 lines outlining what you expect to get by the end of the research. Collecting qualitative data to build a persona, validating design assumptions, or maybe you want to know more about a specific feature or product to know how to build it or improve it. Here is an example:

“ To explore why 30% of our users are dropping off from the checkout page. What are the problems they are facing on the page? What are the incentives needed for encouraging them to complete the purchase ”

Recruiting participants

• select your participants based on the research objectives. You may need to recruit participants that match your persona or you may need participants to help you uncover new potential ideas. It all depends on the interview goal.
• I like to conduct interviews in rounds. 5 participants each round. If I notice by participant 5 that I am no longer getting insights, I don’t start round 2. This is Nielsen Norman’s principle for usability testing.
• You can use IDEO’s Extremes and Mainstreams method to select the sample.
• Survey a patch of product users (usually from 100 to 1000 depending on your users' response rate). In the survey, ask them if they would like to come to the company office for interviews and share some thoughts. And then let them select their available days.
• If you don’t have users yet. You can contact your competitors’ users or users who use similar products. You can find them on advertising channels like Facebook.
• Call the respondents and explain to them the process and what are we going to do in the interview.
• Don’t forget to mention the incentive and send them the office location after the call.
• Incentives are usually financial or maybe a discount code. It varies based on the customer segment and your product.
• Call more than you need. Try to avoid participant no-shows at all costs.
• emphasize how important he or she is to the research and how his or her input will serve the product.
• Call the participant on the morning of the interview day to make sure all is fine.

Prepare the Interview questions

What to ask about?

• Demographic questions are critical in every user interview. You need to know who you are asking before jumping to the real questions. Demographics include age, marital status and kids, carer occupation and aspiration …etc
• The use of technology in general
• The use of your product
• user’s main objectives and motivations
• user’s pain points
• Their life habits, purchasing habits, and daily routine

How to ask?

• Try to keep leading questions to the minimum (Do you use product X rather than how many times did you use product X)
• Use follow up questions (what do you like and don’t like about product X )
• Ask open-ended questions to encourage the user to talk (what are the products you use to transfer money)
• Ask about behaviors and habits more than feelings and expectations (did you face any problems with product x? What are they?)
• Don’t make assumptions. Ask stupid questions
• Don’t ask about solutions. Ask about problems. Solutions require thinking about the unknown, unlike problems that come from the present, from what people are actually experiencing
• Ask about the past experiences, not the expected (Tell me about the experience of the last time you transferred money rather than how would you like to transfer money)
• Ask them to show you if possible and if needed
• Start with the easier and more general questions

Hint: The goal of asking questions is not getting answers, the goal is opening discussions. The Insights you will get from the words between the lines are far more important than the direct answers

The “Why” questions are the most important questions.” Why” questions tells you why people want what they want rather than just what they want

2. During the Interview

Before starting the interview make sure to prepare all the tools you will need for the interview. Usually, you may need a mobile phone to record the interview, White paper, and pen, maybe some sticky notes and designs if you are going to show your user any. During the interview try to observe user’s

• Behavior: what they do
• Words: what they say and how do say it
• Facial expressions: How do they react
• Context: where they are (also known as Contextual Inquiry )

Also, make sure to do the following:

• Start the interview by explaining to the user why you do what you do. I like to say something like “We are doing this interview to validate some assumptions and answer some questions we have, in order to give our customers including you a better service and experience. There is no right or wrong answer. The answer you are going to say is the right one. Imagine we’re sitting in a cafe and having some casual chat ”
• Make sure that your interviewee is comfortable and offer him or her something to drink
• Ask the question, then pause. Listen more than speak
• Try to keep the interview on time and heading in the right direction
• Avoid taking notes unless they are critical and look unique (you are already recording)
• Don’t correct, teach, or educate your interviewees.
• Invite other team members. If the interviewee mentioned something about operations for example. Bring the operation guy and involve him in the interview
• Use problem-solving techniques during the interview. Techniques like fishbone diagrams and 5 whys are very helpful to uncover user deep thoughts. For example, the 5 whys technique helps you dig deep into the user’s answer.
• Make it engaging and interactive. Don’t just ask and wait for the answer, use pen and paper, draw on whiteboards and ask your interviewee to express his or her ideas visually
• Never compare the interviewee with others (the last user said so, do you agree with him?)
• Thank the interviewee at the end of the interview and ask him or her if he or she has any questions
• Ask the interviewee to send you any suggestions or questions that might come to his or her mind after the interview.
• I like to take selfies with the interviewee after the interview :)

3. After the Interview

After the interview, you now have an audio or video recording. I usually transcribe the recording into a google sheet consisting of 3 columns and one big row. In the row, I put the name of the user and all his demographics. The 3 columns are Insight, min/sec, and notes like the screenshot below. The importance of the min column is you might need to get back to the recording later to listen or see how the user said a specific sentence.

After listing all the insights of all the users I create another tab to categorize the insights into groups (ex: observations, pain points, opportunities, needs, purchasing habits …etc) groups names vary depending on the goal of the study. Also, you can use the Thematic analysis technique to analyze the data.

Feel free to reach out to me if you need any support building up your product management team, hiring one, or even a direct consultation for your product.

Thanks for reading

If you are looking for a digital product designer to help you build your next big thing. Reach me out on Linkedin