Mark Shahinian shares advice on conducting user interviews to gain useful insights and data on your product.
The single best source of data on what users need from your product is the user interview. You get a great deal of information from a single user interview. If you do dozens and dozens of them – I’d shoot to spend 3-5 hours a week all told on user interviews – you will develop a powerful sense for what your users need.
The setup
I like to do most customer interviews over a videoconference. A videoconference strikes a nice balance. In-person interviews are valuable in that you get a real feel for who a user is and what they’re about. And for some users, particularly those not particularly adept with technology – corn and soybean farmers I’ve worked with come to mind – it can be the only way to get quality feedback. In-person sessions also extremely expensive in terms of time and travel costs. A phone is pretty low-bandwidth and doesn’t allow for screen-sharing so I try to avoid those. On a videoconference, the best practice is to record the interview – ask the user if they are ok with you recording. Also ask users to turn on their webcams if they’re ok with that – most will be fine with it and it will give you a better feel for your users.
One word about the most common rookie mistake all of us make when we start doing user interviews: we ask users what other users might think. For example, we ask “How important do you think this is to other users.” Users cannot correctly answer this question and if they try, they’ll just be guessing. Also it’s your job to answer this, not theirs. Ask users about their own thoughts, don’t ask them to speculate on the thoughts and needs of others.
Key points include:
- Establishing rapport
- Setting and getting the context
- Working off an interview guide
Read the article, Managing products: User interviews for learning and profit, on Substack.