How to conduct great user interviews
If you do user experience design work or just the user research component of UX work, then user interviews are a critical tool in your toolkit. And you probably know that not all user interviews are useful. A poorly planned or executed user interview can set an entire project up for failure. Since everything will progressively build off of the insights gained and hypotheses formed from user interviews, your subsequent steps are a direct result of the quality of those first steps.
Follow these simple rules to ensure that your user interviews set you up for success down the road.
- Pick an interviewer who can remain neutral.
If the interviewer already has strong opinions about the problems and needs of the users, they run the risk of asking leading questions or guiding the conversation in a predetermined direction.
This goes double for people who may have ideas and opinions about the solutions. If they already think they know the solution, they definitely shouldn’t be the interviewer and probably shouldn’t be on the project at all unless they can peel away that bias.
Worst of all would be an interviewer who’s job depends on a certain solution. This often leads to a solution in search of a problem. For example, a product owner who’s job depends on their product being used as the solution. This creates a huge conflict of interest and makes it very difficult to remain neutral.
2. Focus on having a conversation rather than asking a series of questions
Yes, put together a guide for yourself that consists of the experiences you hope to learn about, but don’t be too rigid. Let the conversation flow organically and use phrases like “tell me more about that”, “what led to that decision?”. “What happened next?” And “how were you feeling at that moment?”. Channel your inner therapist, keep it loose and make sure it doesn’t feel anything like a survey.
3. Make the interviewee feel comfortable being honest
This is related to #1, but I still always make a point to tell the person I am interviewing that I don’t have any skin in the game, am not looking for any particular answers and that there is no such thing as a right or wrong answer in the conversation. All you want is to hear about their experiences, whatever those have been. If they feel like they need to answer in a certain way, they probably will, and the interview will be blown.
4. Progressively narrow
Even if you try your best not to ask leading questions, if you ask specific questions too early, you may end up leading. You may want to learn about someone’s experience with a certain part of a website or a product, but if you ask about that first, you may miss other useful insights. Instead, ask them to tell you about the last time they experienced something that will help you learn about what they value, what their needs are, what their pain points are. For example, if you are considering a redesign of a grocery store, ask people to tell you about the last time they went grocery shopping, the worst time, the best time. Anything that they can recall from experience is great. As you progress through the conversation, you may see opportunities to ask more specific questions. “You mentioned that while grocery shopping, you had a hard time at checkout. Could you tell me more about that?”
5. Team up with someone so you don’t have to capture notes and have a conversation
A comfortable, natural feeling conversation is critical. For many, capturing notes AND maintaining a conversation is a challenge. For that reason, make sure you have one person play the lead interviewer/conversation haver role and a separate person there to listen and capture insights. User interviews can take place in person, over the phone, over video. Whatever the setting, be up front that you “have a colleague here to listen and capture notes” and do whatever you can to keep it from feeling weird. In some cases, you may want to record the interviews for future reference. If so, always ask permission first.
Follow these rules and you should be set up with great, useful insights to help you through your research synthesis, ideation, prototyping and testing rounds. Good luck!
