9 Core recommendations for conducting great user interviews

While working on designing the experience of a product, user interviews are a core UX method in your toolkit. Interviewing is a great practice to gain foundational knowledge about the problems your users are facing. And is easy to mess up.

“User interviews are like everyday conversations.”
“You ask about what your users like and dislike”.
“You ask them how the solution they want looks like”

👆🏼 This is false. This is garbage.

User interviews should be conducted with proper rigor and respect. Many people believe that a user interview is simply a casual conversation with someone to run an idea or prototype but in reality, user interviewing is about trying to get to the core of what a user is trying to do and what their problems are.

In overall, interviews should provide a clear picture of how your target audience discusses a topic in a more personal situation. What do they mention as their main problems, needs, wishes and joys regarding a particular solution, process or service. It can also reflect how they express themselves when discussing such issues.

User interviews must be thorough. Otherwise, you won’t have facts worth acting on unless the questions are well-thought out and purposeful. Only bad data is worse than no data, since everything will progressively build off of the insights gained and hypotheses formed here, your subsequent steps are a direct result of the quality of this first steps.

Here are some of my top 9 core recommendations for conducting user interviews.

1. Structure and Plan.

There are no hard and fast rules on how to organize all this because we sometime depend on the complexity of the topic and the difficulty of participant recruitment.

Start by building a research plan in Word, identify and scribble down the main questions you have in reference with the issue. If you’ve found your responses, keep in mind that success isn’t only dependent on the interview itself. The manner you approach them at the start will have an impact on them. Once you start talking about your inquiries, your tone and style will have an impact on how relaxed they are.

Block your calendar and make sure you leave enough time for interviews, especially if you’re part of a larger or remote team.

2. Focus on finding the problem. Don’t ask people what they want.

Users have no idea what they want. Do not inquire about features or solutions that they may have recommended. They are not designers. So concentrate on figuring out what the users’ challenges are and what they’re trying to accomplish. “What would you like us to do?” should not be one of your questions. “What are you attempting to do?” is more like it.

Like the famous quote from Henry Ford
“If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.”

Users aren’t the ones who create the designs. They can’t imagine anything that hasn’t been built. As designers, our duty is to figure out what people’s concerns are and then create the future.

3. Don’t ask directed or leading questions.

Leading inquiries come in a variety of ways, all of which are harmful. A leading question is the most obvious type, as the main intention is to provoke a specific response from your users.

If you’re asking those kinds of questions is like you’re not willing to accept honest feedback. A good example would be, “Do you have plans for the weekend? Perhaps some football?”

What happens is that you have biased your users with the answer by priming thoughts in their mind. You want answers to be as expansive and elaborate as possible. This means don’t provide users with possible answers.

4. Ask open -ended questions.

Open-ended questions are essential for determining what individuals are attempting to accomplish and what their challenges are, especially while conducting fundamental user research.

I recommend avoiding yes/no questions. Open-ended questions are preferable since they elicit a wide range of responses. Avoid using ambiguous terms as well. Vague statements can be interpreted in a variety of ways, which could lead to you being deceived by someone’s reaction. Asking a user, “Is this a beneficial feature?” for example, may result in inaccurate information.

Ask instead, “Is this functionality valuable to the task you’re doing right now?”

This is a question that is quite similar to the one before, however there are two major differences: It expressly asks if this feature adds value to their own work, and if right now. Valuable is more specific.

5. Don’t make assumptions. Ask stupid questions.

If you don’t ask fundamental questions, you could miss out on a lot of important information. This occurs frequently because you believe you already know the answer.

Basic questions are also an excellent approach to ease someone into an interview. I like to start every user interview with simple questions that don’t need much thought from the participants. This will encourage them to converse and feel at ease during the session. And, surely I’ll also learn something new.

For example, we might ask, “How long have you been in the organization, and how does your role fit in?” at the start of a user interview.

6. Ask the same questions for multiple angles.

Many people need to get deep into a user interview before they can really get to the heart of their beliefs. I’ve discovered that asking the same broad question from several perspectives yields a lot more relevant information than asking it just once.

Spreading these questions throughout your user interview script is the key to achieving this. It will be difficult to put them back to back. Rather, you should ask the question once, follow up with a series of questions to get the person thinking deeper, and then ask a similar question from a different perspective to see if you can elicit more information.

7. Have a set questions you use everytime.

To ensure that your user interviews are methodologically sound, you must utilize the same set of questions each time. When interviewing somebody, don’t just ask random questions.

It can take some effort to come up with a strong set of user interview questions. Personally, it takes me hours some times, even when I have a lot of previous user interview scripts to draw ideas from. Before releasing a script to a wide group of users, I test it on a few users, team mates in and outside the project for example, and refine from there.

8. Be Neutral

Maintain a neutral attitude.
User research isn’t for you if you can’t do that.

Many people struggle to stay neutral when working on their own firm or product.This is one of the reasons why many product managers and designers are poor interviewees. They are intimately committed in their own work, and instead of conducting user research to discover the truth, they will often run a study to verify what they have already done.

9. Take detailed notes

Whether I’m recording or not, I always take extensive notes that include direct quotes. I don’t listen to the recordings on a frequent basis. I generally record interviews so that others can listen to or see them. But if you wish to transcribe the interview, you’ll need to record it somehow anyways.

Good, precise notes with direct quotes and main tags will make subsequently synthesizing the data much easier.

The majority of people will not read your notes or listen to a tape. more valuable than the raw materials you developed is the synthesis of your results and the recommendations you provide.

This recommendations are main takeaways from previous experiences on interviewing users. If you follow these guidelines, you should be able to gain valuable insights to aid you in your research synthesis, ideation, prototyping, and testing stages. What are some tips and best practices that have worked for you? Elaborate on the comments section below. Best of luck!