How we do user interviews at Bravo

Talking to users is a fundamental part of any startup, business or product. We must be sure that what our product offers is aligned and valuable to the people who use it.

At Bravo Studio, we follow multiple techniques that help us understand our users needs, their pain points and motivations so we can make better decisions.

What is user research

“User research is the study of people’s behavior, motivations, and needs in a particular context, which affect how people understand and use things in their daily lives”.

• User research is about understanding, reflecting, knowing, meditating and interpreting.
• User research is about exposing patterns underlying the rich reality of people’s behaviors and experiences.
• Interviews must be faithful to the goals and objectives of the investigation, but the script must be adapted to the user, content, and context of the session.
• User research is a constant fight against bias.

When do we need to use interviewing?

There are numerous ways to gather data about users: usability testing, A/B testing, quantitative surveys, data analytics, interviewing, focus groups and so on. Interviewing isn’t the right approach for every problem; interviews are not good at predicting the future behaviour, like purchase intent or pricing definition.

Interviews are an excellent way to gather detailed information, and may be the best method to utilize if you need to understand the process by which a phenomenon occurs, like how a person makes a decision. For example:

• Why this group of users are struggling with connecting an API to their apps?
• How can we identify opportunities to improve the user experience?
• Do the users understand the odds of Bravo?

“Interviews help us understand how and explains why”

Keep in mind that user interviewing is expensive both in cost and time. So we need to be sure that our hypothesis are valuable and the outcomes of the process worth the effort.

Next up we have have the main steps we follow at Bravo when it comes to user-interviewing:

1. Set a clear goal

It’s vital that you know why you want to conduct the interviews and what you want to get out of them. Therefore we must define one main goal and optionally some sub-goals. For example:

• Understand the problem the user needs to be solved
• Understand the user’s context when doing a specific task
• Identify reasons for the users to upgrade to a higher plan

We must keep in mind these goals during the whole process in order to get the best insights.

It is also essential to define the hypothesis we want to clarify, and have a clear understanding that solving them will generate insights that drive us get impact on company metrics.

💡 Tip: Involve the key stakeholders in the process of defining a purpose for your research.

2. Define the interview structure

Your discussion guide should be closely tied to the purpose of your research and must go from the general to the specific. Always use open-ended questions to allow the interviewee to respond in their own words and allow them to share richer, qualitative details: who, what, when, where, why, and how.

💡 Tip: Keep the script reasonably short

1. Introduction

• Set a good environment/mood, make them feel welcome
• Explain the purpose of the interview
• Explain that there are no good or wrong answers but honest ones
• Point out that the interview is being recorded for internal purposes only

2. General questions

• Usually not related to the product itself. They help us understand the user’s context and for them to familiarise with the interview.

Examples:

• “Could you tell me about your habits?”
• “How long have you been a freelancer?”

3. Specific questions

• Again from the general to the specific

Examples:

• “What is your design flow?”
• “What is your experience with no code?”
• “Why did you sign up to Bravo?”
• “What did you expect?”
• “What parts have you struggled with?”

4. Wrap up

• Did we miss anything? Is there anything you want to tell us?
• Is there anything you want to ask us?
• Thank you!

3. During the interview

Remember, interviews must be faithful to the goals and objectives of the investigation, but the script must be adapted to the user, content, and context of the session. Interviews are neither everyday conversations nor questionnaires; their place is the middle point between both of them. Depending on how the conversation evolves, you can change the order of the questions and dig deeper to understand the interviewee’s point of view.

🗒 Recommendations

• Lead the interview
• Take nothing for granted
• Use open-ended questions
• Use active listening → Listen to understand, not to reply
• Dig deeper, follow up
• Focus on emotions, experiences, and perceptions
• Avoid giving opinions
• Avoid suggesting solutions, focus on the problem
• Avoid leading questions

4. Transcription

At the end of the interview, we must have an accurate transcription of the whole conversation including all the questions and answers. This can be done by another person taking notes during the interview (leading the interview while taking notes is never recommended) or afterward transcribing the recording.

The most important thing here is keeping the most of it, using the same words and expressions that the user has used. The goal is to make the conversation easily accessible anytime by anyone and ready to be processed on the next step. The more complete the transcript, the better insights we will get.

5. Analything and synthesizing interview data

Once we have the transcription, we must analyze and synthesize the information. You want to be sure that data becomes insights, and insights become opportunities — for new features, strategies, but also for teams to embrace a user-centered approach to their work. We also might find something that we didn’t notice during the interview.

“Analyzing is finding an approach that supports a theory.”

In the analysis we will establish the relationships between the smallest and segmented parts, facilitating the understanding in its entirety. This process can be divided in the following steps:

1. Dump data
2. Classify data
3. Search for patterns or themes
4. Extract insights

You can learn more about extracting 1insights here and here.

— Do you want to create an app with no-code? Try Bravo Studio