User Research is an essential part of the UX process wherein it helps us to understand the users’ behavior, aims, and motivations. The main benefit of the research is that it helps the companies in developing the products and services which the people will use. This avoids investing resources in those ideas that don’t matter to the users.

But as we have heard that what people say and do are often very different, that’s why it’s crucial that the time and money spent on research gives us concrete results and reveals the true motivations of the users.

So as a researcher, marketeer, or business owner, when we are asking questions from the existing users or the potential users, we should remain unbiased, non-judgemental, and good listeners. It’s easier said than done. So how can we have useful conversations with our users without actually wasting the company’s time and giving actionable insights?

The following are the key points taken as a reference from the book- The Mom Test by Rob Fitzpatrick for how to have conversations with the users that can reveal their true motivations and needs.

• Know your customer: During interviews, we should be asking more about our customers’ lives: their problems, cares, constraints, and goals. It is always a good idea to pre-plan the three most important things you want to learn from any given type of person. Learning about a customer and their problems works better as a quick and casual chat than a long, formal meeting. This is because it is important to know how our product or service fits into their lives or in what context are they being used.
• Don’t mention your business idea: One of the most common and biggest mistakes is to mention our idea too soon rather than too late. It’s better to start talking about their life instead of our idea. We should give as little information as possible about our idea while still nudging the discussion in a useful direction. We generally do mistakes in asking for their opinions e.g. Do you like this idea? Do you think this will work in the future? While we should be asking about specifics in the past instead of generics or opinions about the future.
  But why not mention our idea? Because its human nature, people will try to protect your feelings.
  Founder: “Hey! Do you think a meal planner app is a good idea?”
  Consumer: “Yeah! Seems so!”
  Now the founder is feeling great that his idea has been approved by his consumer, so it must be worth trying it out.
  You see, compliments are worthless and people’s approval doesn’t make our business better.
• Know their social network structure: The key point is to know how their decision making is driven through their social networks.
  What tools do they use for networking?
  What sources of network do they rely upon for shopping or other types of decision making?
  Which are the trusted source of information for them?
• Talking about money: I know this is a difficult part to deal with but instead of asking how much would they pay for a product, try to know:
  How much does the problem cost them?
  How much do they currently pay to solve it?
  How big is the budget they’ve allocated?
• Find out customers’ priorities: People know what their problems are, but they don’t know how to solve those problems. But what we have to understand is that some problems doesn’t matter much. Try to know what is the priority of the problems. If users haven’t looked for ways of solving their problems already, they’re not going to look for (or buy) our product or service.
• Never fill the gaps: People speak in paragraphs. When there is silence in a conversation, our brain quickly jumps in to fill the gaps, and thereby we don’t allow the user to finish their thought process. As a result we might lose some useful insights.
  Interviewer: “So what did you have in breakfast today?”
  User: “Mmm!! Some scambled eggs with cheese….and some milk…………I am thinking to lose some weight… so maybe from tomorrow onwards I will start my day with fruits……or maybe cornflakes”
• Dealing with feature requests by customers: Ideas and feature requests should be understood, but not obeyed. If users tell you for such things, then the following questions should be asked:
  “Why do you want that?”
  “What would that let you do?”
  “How are you coping without it?”
  “Tell me more about that.”
• When to ask specific questions: Start with broad and generic questions and don’t zoom in until you’ve found a strong signal, both with your whole business and with every conversation. Premature zoom does not tell how much the user cares about the problem that they are facing. It leads to unimportant questions and we fail to see the big picture.

So how long should we conduct this research? Just keep having conversations until you stop hearing new stuff.

But of course, before we start any of this process, we should know “What do we want to learn from these guys?” If we don’t know what we’re trying to learn, we shouldn’t bother having the conversation.