Stop asking your users what they want

Four common questions you should avoid to improve the quality of your user interviews

If you’re making and selling a product, you need to know your customers. After all, they’re the people you’re trying to make happy, so it pays to know what’ll be good for them. User interviews are a method user researchers use to learn more about their customer base. You talk to someone one-to-one about their wants and needs. Sometimes you’ll show them things like prototypes to gain further insights.

Interviews are simple to run, but it can be easy to mess them up and ask the wrong questions. A common mistake is to ask your interviewee to come up with a solution with you. This is wrong. What you’re doing is trying to understand them so that your team can make something for them. The design should be left to the professionals, right?

Asking the wrong questions in interviews can lead you down a path where you aren’t discovering anything. Or worse, focusing on the wrong points. Below I’ll give you some examples of terrible questions and advice on how to make them better.

“What would you use this app/website/product for?”

We ask this to try and establish a product-market fit. Does your target user see…