A survival guide to user interviews

This article will take you through a step by step process of how to prepare, run and share successful user interviews. Starting from the moment why do you need to outline the fundamental question and ending with how to get your team more interested in the research you’re doing. We will also talk about how to get to the bottom of user motivation, what questions are gold and which ones are absolutely worthless when it comes to user research.

User interviews can be awkward, intimidating and weird but also they are extremely useful in understanding your users’ needs and goals. A successful user interview is an interview that leaves you with actionable and testable insights. In this article, I am going to outline the steps you have to take to bring your interviews to the next level.

At the beginning of my career, I used to be terrified of interviews. I am not a native English speaker, so talking to strangers in English was my worst nightmare. I would go into interview sessions armed with my script secretly hoping that the respondent wouldn’t show up. If they showed up I would briefly go through the questions and settle for any answers I’d hear, just to end this uncomfortable torture. Needless to say, the majority of my interviews was not insightful at all.

Over time I’ve had a lot of practice and employed multiple techniques for getting to the bottom of the problem. Now in some weeks, I can have up to 15 interviews scheduled and I love it. Back in the day, I haven’t had anyone to guide me through this, so this article is some sort of advice I wish someone would have given me.

Before interview

Outline The Fundamental Question

Often you see companies that regularly talk to their users yet struggle to uncover any new insights. This happens because teams do it out of habit rather than out of curiosity. There are no fundamental questions behind such research sessions, it’s more like “Let’s talk to users to see if everything is okay”.

Lewis Carroll created a great dialogue between disoriented Alice and Cheshire Cat