User Interviews: The Ultimate Guide to Research Interviews
How to Interview Users, Best Practices, Common Mistakes, Download 60+ Ready-To-Use User Interview Questions.
Hey, welcome to The Product Compass, republished on Medium.
Every Saturday, I share actionable tips to boost your PM career.
In Today’s newsletter:
- Types of User Interviews
- Prerequisites. How to Prepare for the Research User Interview.
- The Interview Process
- Best Practices
- 🔒 Common Mistakes
- 🔒 Additional Advice
- 🔒 Download 60+ Ready-To-Use User Interview Question
1. Types of User Interviews
First, let’s start with classifying user interviews.
Most sources you might find mention:
- Structured interviews (all questions are planned).
- Semi-structured interviews (some questions are planned).
- Unstructured interviews (none of the questions are planned).
In my opinion, that classification is not that important. You won’t find it in Continuous Discovery Habits by Teresa Torres and The Mom Test by Rob Fitzpatrick.
Product teams have specific goals and should prepare their questions in advance. At the same time, what’s been working for me and many other PMs I talked to is listening and reacting to what the person says. Not just following the script.
A classification that matters the most involves the goal of the interview:
- Research interviews: Your objective is to understand user needs, experiences, behaviors, motivations, and attitudes in the context of the research goals you have. Research interviews help you identify customer clusters (“personas”) and their underserved needs and might inform your strategy, especially for new products.
- Usability testing interviews: You aim to understand user interactions and how they perceive your idea to address value and usability risks before the implementation. A common approach is asking participants to complete a task using a prototype, with additional questions to further the evaluation. Many of those interviews can be automated. I have described this and other usability experiments in The Ultimate Validation Experiments Library and won’t focus on them in this post.
2. Prerequisites. How to Prepare for the Research User Interview.
Preparing for a user interview is a crucial step. The best practices:
2.1 Define your research goals
The research goal is simply what you are trying to achieve.
For Continuous Product Discovery, you want to identify opportunities that, when solved, will drive the desired Product Outcome. An example might be, “Customers spend 10% more time watching videos every month.”
For other types of interviews, like customer success interviews, it might be understanding the customer’s experience with the product, gauging their satisfaction, identifying any challenges they face, and uncovering areas for improvement.
2.2 Recruit participants based on your goals
Finding participants might be challenging, so it’s worth considering it in advance.
My favorite approach is encouraging users to opt in to interviews while using your product. It might be as simple as a popup or additional email question in a CSAT survey. This can be quickly done with popular product analytics platforms (Pendo, Gainsight) or solutions like Maze.
Another approach is leveraging internal teams, specifically Sales, Support, and Customer Success. It has worked for me in B2B products where the number of customers was limited.
Finally, you might consider paying customers for the interview. This works particularly well with people who are not your customers.
Other strategies involve leveraging your network, posting on social media (potential customers), organizing webinars, publishing free ebooks to collect contacts, or sending personalized emails (the more personalization, the higher the conversion).
2.3 Prepare research questions and interview questions
Many people were surprised when it turned out that the interviewing legend Larry King never prepared for his interviews.
His secret? He loved listening.
While listening to the customers is essential, product teams have specific goals and, while staying open to changing the direction, should plan two types of questions:
Research questions are the questions you want to answer, aligned with your research goals, for example:
- What prevents customers from spending more time…?
- Why do the most active customers spend so much time…?
- As Teresa Torres defines in Continuous Discovery Habits, “Our primary research question in any interview should be: What pain points, needs, and desires matter the most to this customer?”
Interview questions are the questions you will ask. More in the following points.
2.4 Plan how to document the interview
It’s been a common approach that one of the persons acts as a note-taker so that others can focus on being present and listening actively.
My favorite approach is recording calls (Zoom). You can then listen to it carefully, download the transcript, and even summarize the critical points with the help of AI. Getting participant’s consent is rarely a problem.
A tool that can do all this is Poised (AI communication coach), which not only generates a transcript but also summarizes the conversation and action points and gives you live feedback on your tone, filler words (uhh, umm), peace of talk, clarity, etc. (this post is not sponsored).
2.5 Ensure diverse perspectives
Product Discovery is not a task for a single person. Instead of building stage gates, we should embrace the collaborative approach.
In the case of Continuous Product Discovery, the whole Product Trio (Product Manager, Product Designer, and Lead Engineer) should be present during an interview.
This will help you build a shared understanding. Each of those people brings different perspectives to the table.
3. The Interview Process
The interview process is straightforward and intuitive:
3.1 Introduction
Welcome participant. You typically start with a friendly greeting, which helps to establish a comfortable and relaxed atmosphere.
Introduce your team and explain the purpose of the interview (Why).
Before proceeding, ask if the participant has any questions and ensure they are comfortable and ready to start.
Ease into the conversation with some light, open-ended questions like:
- Q: What initially interested you in [their area of expertise]?
- Q: Could you tell me a little about your role and what a typical day looks like?
What has worked well for me is acknowledging the participant’s presence and asking them about their emotions, not just facts, like:
- Q: “I’ve always been interested in…because…. How did you manage to break into [specific field]?”
- Q: “It’s such a fascinating field. How does it feel to [do something meaningful]?”
3.2 Interview
Seamlessly transition into the interview part. The best practices and common mistakes are described in the following points.
3.3 Conclusion
You aim to summarize the discussion, gather final thoughts, and ensure nothing significant has been missed.
You might ask questions like:
- Q: Is there anything we haven’t covered that you think is important for us to know about your experience with [product]?
- Q: Were there any questions you expected me to ask that I didn’t?
Express gratitude and ask whether it’s okay to contact the customer in the future.
3.4 Data analysis
After the interview, it’s time to analyze the data.
In the case of Continuous Product Discovery, it’s synthesizing insights and mapping Opportunities in the form of Opportunity Solution Tree.
For Jobs-to-be-Done, it might be synthesizing information about the job, job steps, and importance and satisfaction with the ability to achieve desired outcomes.
4. Best Practices
4.1 Interview weekly
In her book Continuous Discovery Habits, Teresa Torres strongly recommends interviewing at least one customer a week.
Over time, it helps you build an in-depth understanding of your customers. And it becomes a habit.
I recommend that the entire Product Trio set a specific time slot in your calendars each week for those meetings.
4.2 Listen more than you talk
Tune into what your customers are saying. Encourage them to share their stories and experiences.
Listen actively by rephrasing what they say and asking clarifying questions.
This isn’t the time for you to dominate the conversation. It’s about understanding them better.
4.3 Ask behavioral questions
People are biased, and their self-reported opinions may not accurately reflect their true actions or decisions.
That’s why it’s essential to focus on asking about real situations they’ve encountered.
These questions help uncover patterns of behavior that are much more predictive of future actions than general opinions or hypothetical scenarios.
Ideally, you want to combine them with asking customers to tell a story.
4.4 Storytelling technique
Can you recite the alphabet from Z to A as fluently as from A to Z?
Me neither.
Our memory tends to store information in a sequence.
Encourage customers to narrate their experiences in detail, just as a detective would ask a witness to recount an event. Ask them to set the scene, describe the characters involved, and walk you through what happened step by step.
That way, you can:
- Help the participant retrieve details that might be missed if the story were told out of order.
- Understand the context of an event, which is often as important as the event itself.
- Reduce the chance of the participant being influenced by leading questions or the interviewer’s biases.
- Help the participant emotionally connect to the memory, which can sometimes trigger additional details being remembered.
We usually start with an opening question, like:
- Q: Tell me about a specific time when [something].
And then, continue the story:
- Q: What time of day was it?
- Q: What happened next?
- Q: How much time did you spend trying to solve this?
- Q: Have you tried any workarounds? Can you describe them?
This method makes the conversation more engaging, reveals essential details, and helps you understand the whole story behind a customer’s experience.
4.5 Reverse-engineer problems
When a customer suggests a solution, dig deeper. Ask them how this solution would improve their experience. For example:
- Q: What would that do for you if you had that feature?
- Q: Why is it a problem for you? What were the consequences the last time?
This helps you understand the real problem they’re trying to solve.
4.6 Ask why and probe deeper
Don’t stop at the first answer. You want to get to the root cause of the problem.
Ask ‘Why?’ several times (the 5xWhys technique) to get to the root of their thoughts and feelings.
It’s like peeling an onion. Each layer brings you closer to the core insight.
Thanks a Bunch
Hope that helps. That was a public part.
Continue reading in my newsletter to learn about:
5. 🔒 Common Mistakes 6. 🔒 Additional Advice 7. 🔒 Download 60+ Ready-To-Use User Interview Questions
Read the full post: User Interviews: The Ultimate Guide to Research Interviews.
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