How to approach customer interviews

Photo by Maranda Vandergriff on Unsplash

This week I got a new project for which I should be responsible from beginning to the end. Because there is only a quite blurry description of what the project should be like, I have to do some interviews with our customers. In my special case, our customers are also developers, that work on business code.

I separate this article into three different subtopics:

• Preparation
• Doing the interview
• Evaluating the Answers

Preparation

First of all, the most important thing for an interview is the preparation. You have to define first what you want to know from your customer. After that, you can create open-ended questions for it.

In my case, I wanted to know if they have problems or inconveniences with the current solution and if they would benefit from the new project.

This is a quite short question and if I would ask it just like it stands there, the answers would only consist out of “yes” and “no”. This is a bad strategy, because neither do I know what features they want to have in this new project nor do I know what exactly caused these inconveniences in the first place.

To tackle this problem, we need to formulate open-ended questions from it. Open-ended questions are questions that don’t have a specified selection of possible answers. They should begin with words like: “why”, “how”, “what”, “describe”, “tell me about…” or “what do you think about…”

In my case, the questions that I generated out of the base question were these:

• How do you interact with the current solution in your daily work?
• What are the pain points in your daily work depending the current solution?
• Describe what functionalities the new solution needs in your eyes.
• Tell me about how this new solution could impact your work.

Doing the interview

Now that you have prepared yourself with interview questions, we can start the interview.

Normally it is best to reserve a time slot that has quite a margin so that you dont ‘t have to stress if a discussion takes longer than planned.

When you start the interview, introduce yourself, aswell as the topic you want to get informations about. Maybe the interviewee recognises that he has no experience in the requested field or in my case does not even need the old solution, so why should he want to use a new solution.

After these initial steps, you can start asking your open-ended questions. You don’t have to ask all of the questions if the interviewee gave you the answer in a prior question. The order of the questions does not matter that much.

The flow of the conversation should be as natural as possible. If the interviewee is stuck with answering the question, you can help him out by reformulating it in an easier way or asking some follow up questions to guide him in the right direction.

Evaluating the Answers

Now that you got all the answers it is finally time to evaluate them.

These were the notes that I created during one interview:

First of all, I created Personas from my notes that represent each group of people that I interviewed.

I then looked at the personas and created functional and non functional requirements for my project. This way, I knew exactly what the different groups of customers want and I was able to weigh some of the requirements a little heavier than others.

Reflection

What went good

In my opinion, the interview itself went pretty good. Sometimes I needed to interrupt the interviewees if they faded away a little bit to much. I think I learned a lot from this experience and it was interesting to see how the wording of a question can influence the answer.

What needs improvement

At the beginning I wasn’t sure how I should approach this task. I had problems finding the right people to do the interview with. After I discussed it with my team, more and more names popped up which I could then use for the interview. Next time, I would directly ask my PO for these kinds of information, because he has a much wider network than I have.