Conducting user interviews

There’s a lot of work that goes into preparing for user interviews. Once that’s out of the way and we‘re ready, we’ll need to recruit participants, schedule a time to talk, then have those conversations.

The first step is to find people willing to spend the time to have an interview.

Finding participants

Finding the right users to interview is crucial. Since designing thinking builds off of itself as you progress through each step in the process, the users you speak to become the foundation of the product you build. Thus, it’s ideal if you find the “right” people to speak to.

Who are the right people, though? That’s up to you and your team to decide. Who do you want to target? Are you building a mobile recipe app? Then you’ll probably want to talk to people who cook a lot. Are you building a learning dashboard? Then you’ll want to talk to students. Try to think of the ideal person who would use and love the product you want to build.

What about the right number of people? For user interviews, this is less clear. For complex persona work, for example, you need to talk to a lot of people to develop a robust, clear understanding of the market and your users. Unfortunately, most teams don’t have the time or money to invest in this. For quicker projects, you can make proto-personas, or archetypes of your users, with just a handful of user interviews.

To start, I’d recommend talking to around 6 people — that should give you enough data to work with when analyzing your results.

After you have an idea of who you want to talk to and how many people to interview, you need to find them. There’s a few ways you can do that.

Surveys

Sending out screener surveys is an effective way to find users to talk to. You can write a survey that is structured to hone in on the ideal user to talk to. If you have an idea of your users, such as, that they shop online often, then you can write a survey and include questions about shopping habits. Then, you can reach out to the users that indicate that they shop a lot in their answers.

It’s common to send out screener surveys that answer high level questions you have about the market (perhaps, how often people take a certain behavior) and gain some information about market trends. For the users that seem promising, you can bring them in to talk. It’s a two-tiered approach to getting some really good information.

It’s common to receive surveys in emails, on websites, and even in specialized groups, via Slack, Discord, or message forums. When researching your project, you can do the same. Try to find the communities that could have the users you want to speak to. If you want to interview writers, try looking at common blogging sites like Medium. To talk to gamers, you can hop onto popular Discord servers and drop a link to your survey, to see who answers.

Social Media

Like surveys, you can find the popular communities for your users and post to social media asking for user interview participants. If you want to find people who like guitar, you could head to Facebook to guitar groups and post.

Alternatively, if you have a social media presence, you can ask your friends and family to participate in research to help you. This is a common method for students, who may not have the budget or network to afford compensating individuals for their time.

Recruitment Services

To recruit users, you can also rely on companies like UserTesting.com, Mechanical Turk, or Maze. These companies find users for you to speak to, for a fee. While potentially costly, they help filter for demographic information, which lets you hone in on the best user possible. Since user interviews are so crucial to the entire design thinking process, it’s common to make the investment to get the best quality you can, upfront.

Guerilla Testing

On the opposite end of the spectrum of targeted service driven user recruitment is guerilla testing. This is a more do-it-yourself approach to recruitment, where you go to a physical location where your target users congregate and talk to them yourself.

If you know you want to talk to avid book readers, you can go to a bookstore and try to find strangers willing to answer a few questions. Or perhaps you want to talk to nature lovers, and you could go to a park to find people to interview.

This method has the highest variability, since you don’t know if the people willing to talk to you will be good interview candidates. However, it’s a faster way to get results and a low-cost way to do so.

Each method of recruitment has its pros and cons, and can be valid depending on your time, budget, and comfort level. Once you have your users to talk to, however, the next step is to conduct the interview.

Interviewing your participants

After all your preparation, it’s time to interview! This is one of the most exciting parts of the process, where you get to speak directly to the people you want to help. It can be challenging to have these conversations, since there’s so many different ways to navigate them, and it takes real practice to become good at doing interviews.

Your users are probably nervous too! You’re about to ask them a bunch of potentially personal questions about what they do and what they think, and they might not know what to expect.

Luckily, there are some things you can do to make this process easier.

Make sure users are comfortable

One of the primary things you should establish at the beginning of the conversation is to ensure your users are comfortable. If they don’t feel comfortable during the conversation, it will be difficult to learn from them and it will make the conversation awkward. Start by asking them how they are doing today, then explaining the interview process:

“Hi there! I’m [name], and I’m working on a problem to better understand [issue]. How are you doing today?”

“We’re meeting today to discuss your experiences with [issue]. We’re going to spend around [amount of time] talking today. Do you have any questions for me before we begin?”

It also helps to ask if a participant wants any water, or is comfortable before beginning the interview.

Capture audio / video

To make sure you get all the information revealed during the interview, it is best practice to record the conversation. If you can, it will help avoid needing to take notes directly. This has a powerful, subtle effect — you can focus completely on the conversation and the user, fully engaging them in the interview, rather than focus on taking notes or writing down a quote. Ideally, you have both a note-taker and a facilitator present, but you can get by with just a facilitator.

When recording a conversation, make sure you have your user’s permission:

“Before we begin, would you mind if I record our conversation? It will be helpful to have a record to refer back to. I promise that I’ll only use it for internal purposes, to share with my team and reflect on, and it won’t be used publicly.”

Ask why / clarifying

When asking questions from your script, it’s easy to stick to each question and move through it, like a list. However, make sure you have received a satisfactory answer to your question before proceeding to the next one. If you don’t fully understand a user’s motivation behind an answer, you need to ask for clarification. Simply asking the word “why” can get you that clarity.

“Do you like our app?”

“Yes!”

“…why?”

“Because it’s easy to use!”

“…why?”

“Because I understand where everything’s placed and it’s just there, ready for me to use!”

“Ah, ok, great!”

Another tactic you can use in this spot is silence. If you don’t say anything, your participant may feel compelled to fill that silence with more information.

“Do you like our app?”

“Yes!”

“………”

“…because it’s easy to use!”

“………”

“…because I understand where everything’s placed and it’s just there, ready for me to use!”

“Ah, ok, great!”

User interviews are really challenging to do, and to do well. To see an example of a talented researcher in action, here’s a great video where a researcher speaks with a participant about her experiences.

After the interview

Once the interview is complete, make sure to thank your participant for their time. If there’s any followup, like payment, make sure you have a plan for that as well.

As for the content of the interview, there are a few things you can do to make things easier for you once it’s time to analyze your results.

Take notes post interview

Immediately after the interview, it’s helpful to write down key observations. The conversation is still fresh in your mind, and there are things you’ll want to highlight. Some shorthand notes of where to look back, or overall impressions, will help you later on.

Transcribe audio into text

Once you have your recording, it can be difficult to transcribe that information into artifacts like pull quotes (which are really valuable for highlighting key insights). Using audio transcription services like Otter.ai make this process a lot faster, and will help you pull information once you’re ready to synthesize all your interviews.

Build an interview plan, then follow the plan

There’s no one specific way to conduct a user interview — rather, there’s a general flow and process we can follow to find participants, ask them our questions, and hear their feedback. Hopefully this breakdown helps guide you through the interview process and leaves you well prepared to find participants and conduct your own interviews!

Thanks for reading! I like to write about games, design, and UX. Read more of my work on Medium. Wanna chat? Connect with me on LinkedIn. Looking to work together? Check out my personal site.