User Research — Interviewing Potential Users

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As entrepreneurs or designers, you have to find the right balance between vision and reality. Every new business idea is built upon assumptions - risky assumptions. It is important to test these risky assumptions from the onset. You have to 'Get out of the building' and speak to your potential users/customers.

When interviewing users, you are not there to pitch your idea to people, you are there to learn. You are searching for clues to deny or confirm your assumptions. You are looking for patterns to help you make better decisions. Better decisions lead to smart actions and smart actions lead to success.

You need to understand your market. Your market are your potential users or customers. So, you need to understand your users.
You don’t understand your potential users by seating in your room and brainstorming with your team. You understand your users by getting out of the building, talking to your users and observing them. Many times we fall in love with our 'ground breaking' idea and refuse to seek feedback. This leads to failure.

How Do You Interview Users?

You have assumptions of how your business will run, some may be right others may be wrong. The wrong ones could bring down your business.
So first, make a list of all your assumptions or hypotheses, starting with riskiest- the hypothesis which if proven false will cause your business to fail. You don’t necessarily need to test all your hypotheses, start with the riskiest ones.
Let’s take an example, imagine you have an idea to start a food delivery service in a university, these may be some of your hypotheses:

1. I believe that people prefer to eat outside instead of cooking.
2. I believe that people don’t really like having to trek down to restaurants but would prefer the ‘restaurant to come to them’.
3. I believe people will pay extra to have their food come to them instead of going to the restaurant.
4. I believe my very first customers will be those living off campus.
5. I believe I can raise enough capital to cover cost of starting up.

…

Next, you walk in the shoes of your potential users. For our previous example that will be leaving your home to go and eat in a restaurant.
Observe your users. Study as they go to eat in restaurants. Engage them in conversations and use this opportunity to interview some of them.
By walking in your potential user’s shoes you gain empathy and a personalised understanding of their problems. By observing them you know how they behave. When you talk to them you get to know the motivation behind their behaviour.

Note

"What people say is different from what they do"

So it is good you both observe them and talk to them.
Do not ask Close ended questions, that is, questions that have Yes or No as their answer. Ask Open ended questions — questions that start with What, Why, How, Where, When…
Human beings are not good at predicting or speculating. Don’t ask questions like:

• Is my idea good
• Will you use my product
• Would you pay for so and so service …

Before you go and Interview users, prepare an Interview guide. It will contain questions you want to ask your users. You don’t need to follow it strictly let it be there to guide you.
The questions will be based on your hypotheses.

For example:
Introduction: my name is xyz I am working on....
Sample questions based on our hypotheses.

1. Why do you come to the restaurant to eat?
2. What do you love about coming to the restaurant.
3. Why don’t you cook at home?
4. Why don’t you tell your friends who are going to the restaurant to buy food and bring to you?
5. Where do you stay? Hostel or off campus?
6. How do you cope with the stress of trekking to the restaurant to eat?
7. ...

After the interview, get your team together, analyse the results, find patterns. Find out which hypotheses were disproved or confirmed.
Find out what information you have gathered that you didn’t know before. See if you still need to do more research.
Use what you have learnt to refine your idea before you begin building. With this you will build a better product that better solves the users problem.

Know Your Users.

Get out of the building.

Talk to your Users.

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Thanks a lot for your time!