My Experience with Conducting User Interviews and How You can do Them!

In my current organisation(Technogise), I landed this opportunity to conduct user interviews for one of their in-house product.

“A User Interview is a research method in product development where one-on-one conversations are held with potential users to gather insights and feedback about their needs, motivations, and experiences with similar products. The information gathered helps inform the design and development of the product.”

For me, it was the first time facilitating such a discussion as I had heard and read about it before.

What were the initial thoughts?

It all started with an online search on:

• How to conduct user interviews?
• How to efficiently conduct user interviews?
• Top 10 questions to ask in a user interview.
• How to structure your questions?

and the list went on…..

When you do an Online Search, things start to become overwhelming as you have plethora of information at your disposal still, you cannot decide what’s relevant.

How did I structure my session?

I did what I generally do, took online search as a reference and proceeded with a structure of my own.

Wow, is it that simple?

Indeed. If you associate yourself with the circumstances(the product for which you want to conduct the interviews), you are the best judge of what is relevant or not.

What did I end up doing after considering my options?

• Picked up a sample size which needed to be interviewed.
• Ensured that the 1:1 session consisted of people across diverse roles, tenure, gender, function.

Diversity is important to achieve a wider range of ideas and approaches to solving problems, leading to more innovative and effective solutions.

• You are the best judge of your product, curate your questions accordingly(adding below few questions I framed for my session).

• The flow of questions should help you to capture the best inputs from the interviewee.
• Schedule meeting with each individual.

During the meeting, DO NOT rush to capture all the information in one go, take your time and most importantly, give the interviewee sufficient time to process your questions.

Tip: Make sure to keep their inputs anonymous and call this out to the interviewee to maximise the quality of information shared.

• Once the session is over, appreciate them for their contribution.

Appreciate yourself too for conducting such a session as it is mentally taxing to keep repeating same set of questions again and again.

What’s next after the interviews were finished?

Once I had interviewed all the individuals, next was to summarise my interview journey and the inputs received.

How did I summarise all this information, was there a template to structure all this information?

Indeed, the Online Search began, again :). After finding multiple resources, I finally created my own version of interview summary template, you can find it here.

You can create a word doc, slides, spreadsheet document, html website etc. to summarise your findings.

Tip: Keep the content simple. Do not bloat it with a lot of text, visuals.

Pro Tip: Make sure you have identified the next steps(section mentioned in the sample template) after you create the interview summary as it helps you to lay down a roadmap to implement solutions for the pain points.

If you follow your own thoughts, you’ll be able to curate and conduct your own version of User Interviews.

Now go, and conduct one 🙂.