User Interviews

User interviews are where you will actually sit down with or collect information from people to see if your solution to a problem is viable or not.  Expect to block out 30 minutes to an hour of time where you’ll be actively listening. When finished you will need time to analyze what information was gathered both quantitatively and qualitatively.  When trying to identify who you want to interview you need to know who to include, but also who to exclude. Using a screening questionnaire will help guide you in this endeavor. Google forms is a great way to create your screening questionnaire.  Below is a brief example of what that could look like.

Having a monetary incentive is a great way to get qualified participants.  Your screening questionnaire will also have filtering questions in it so that you know the submitted participants would be useful in your research.  Once it is created you’ll want to post it online to find your candidates. Some places you can go to place them are:

• Craigslist
• Social Networks
• Community Groups (gmail forum, productivity forum, etc)
• Student Groups
• Personal Networks

User Interview Structure

Typically your format will be as follows:

• Introduction
• Warm up/context questions
• Main body questions
• Follow-up questions
• Debrief/Wrap-up

In your introduction be SURE to state something along the lines of, “Hey just so know I am not the creator of this product and so please be as honest as possible because you won’t offend me on any feedback given.”  This will make them feel more comfortable and honest about what they have to say. Again we’re legitimately trying to solve a problem, not get confirmation bias from friends and family and participants who think getting paid would be in some way tied to painting the products, features, solutions in a positive light.

When you’re conducting the interview it is ideal to pair up.  This allows one person to ask the questions and guide the interviewee through the interview while the second person is taking notes.  If possible try to record the session whether that be audio or video with the interviewee’s permission of course. This helps to see if you had any leading questions and discount the responses if so.  It also helps to see if you missed anything outside of the notes you took during the interview.

Interview Analysis

After the interview is completed you’re going to want to clean up your notes.  Be sure to pull out key insights, key quotes, and top learning moments. It is helpful to create a spreadsheet to organize your thoughts and user responses where the column headings have key questions you wanted to ask in your interview and the rows are the responses of each user with each cell containing the user’s response to the column heading question.  If at all possible you’re going to want to distill commonalities and themes and see if there are any common relationships via affinity mapping or open/closed sorting.