User Interviews 101: How to Run User Interviews

Photo by Kenny Eliason on Unsplash

When you are building a product you keep hearing: “Talk to your users” – but how do you actually do that? Do you just show up and have a chat? Do you talk to anyone who wants to have a chat? And after that? How do you make sure you get value out of that conversation? Conducting user interviews does not have to be intimidating if you follow a few simple steps.

Step 1 – Define what you want to learn from your users

We talk to users because we want to learn something we don’t know about. But not everything they tell us is useful or can lead to insights. We want to learn things about them that will help us make better product decisions and de-risk the development efforts. So a first step is to list all your assumptions about your users: their behaviours, their needs, what they struggle with, etc.

Think through how each of those assumptions affect risks in your product development (check out Marty Cagan’s classification for a good risk framework). Prioritise each assumption according to how impactful it is to your product risks. Ask the question: “if this assumption is not true how does that impact the success of the product?”; any assumption that if false has the potential to “break” your product is the area you want to learn more about!

Step 2 – Define who you want to talk to

Not all users have the insights you need. You need to think carefully about who do you want to talk to. Start by segmenting your users – try to define at least a few dimensions to create your segments:

• Based on user demographics – what they do, where they live / work, their age, etc
• Based on how they interact with your product – how often they use it, what features they use, how much they spend, etc
• (For B2B) Based on the company they work for – what sectors they operate on, how big is the company, what markets they serve, etc.

These dimensions should help you identify who do you want to talk to.

Step 3 – Recruit your users!

Now you know which users to talk to now is time to recruit them. You should build a database of users that are interested and willing to participate in interviews, you can leverage other feedback gathering mechanisms, such as in product surveys for example (check out this article for an example), to build this pipeline of users to interview.

If you are starting out and don’t have a database of users to tap into you can start by reaching your target users via their preferred communications channel (email, sms, etc). If you are working in a B2B setting be sure to work with your customer success and sales teams to help you reach the users you want to. You can offer users incentives like gift vouchers and/or credits to increase participation rates.

If you are intending to reach out to a new audience you can use services like https://www.userinterviews.com or www.respondent.com to speed up the recruitment time.

Step 4 – Prepare and run your Interview!!

Now you have interviews scheduled it is time to actually do it! Be sure to have a script to guide you through the interviews – this helps make sure you are collecting consistent responses and helps you keep the subject on topic if they deviate.

To help you craft your script follow this basic structure:

• Warm up questions – start with explaining what the interview is about and what you hope to get out of it – however do not prime the subject by telling them your hypothesis or what you are working on. Following the introduction, warm up the subject by asking questions that they can easily answer, for example: Describe their role or their company.
• Focus Questions: these are the questions that form the core of what you want to learn from users. Avoid asking yes or no questions – choosing always open ended questions. Do not ask what users “would do” – people are terrible predictors of their own behaviour – choose instead to ask about concrete past actions, if the user start to hypothesise about their behaviour bring them back to concrete example. For a quick and fun overview on the type of questions to ask and what pitfalls to avoid watch this video.
• Close: wrap up the interview with a completely open question (something like: is there anything else you’d like me to know?) and/or let the subject ask questions about your product or research. Take the opportunity to ask if the subject would like to participate again to build a list of users that you can always tap into!

You should aim to cover no more than 3/4 of the allocated time for your interview – you want to make sure you have time to cover everything you need and give time for the user to express themselves. During the interview you don’t have to strictly follow the script. Take the opportunity to probe deeper (asking why) when the user is not responding in depth and let the user talk as much as they can.

Step 5 – Analyse your data

Product teams do not always take the time to analyse the entirety of their interviews in aggregate – and rely more on quick debriefs at the end of each interview. This is not ideal. First impressions from an interview are not always accurate – and combining multiple view points is challenging if you don’t look at it in aggregate. You start being prey to your biases and only listening to confirmatory evidence. So after finishing your interviews make sure to analyse the results on aggregate!

Listen back to the interview or read a transcript of the interview. Note the interesting quotes from each interview about the subject you are interested it. Map all similar quotes together to find themes and summarise the insight you get to uncover opportunities for your product.

Ferilla Discovery (www.ferilla.com) automates this entire analysis steps so you can focus on acting on the insights and shipping your product faster!

Step 6 -Bring others with you in the journey

Learning about your users and not sharing with your team and the rest of the company is a recipe for all that insight to be lost and not acted upon. Once you finish your analysis be sure to have your team involved in ideating what to do next. If you work in a B2B setting summarise what you learned from an interview and share it with the customer success manager and account executive for the account the user belongs too. Share the analysis and what your next steps are with your stakeholders – involve them in the decisions you are making based on what you learned!