How to conduct user interviews: A Quick Guide with Useful Tools

How to conduct user interviews: A Quick Guide with Useful Tools

User interviews are one of the mainstays of the user research toolbox, they provide the qualitative insights needed to create personas and add colour to the data gained through website analysis or user surveys.

However, the logistics of running user interviews can be a bit of a mystery. While I don’t profess to be an expert, I have spent considerable time planning, arranging, conducting, and analysing user interviews, which puts me in a good place to share an approach.

Step 1: Planning

Before you dive into interviewing users, it’s vital to understand exactly what you are trying to find out. A research planning session is an important step where you can set out:

The objectives of the research

Any burning questions that the organisation has

The methods of recruiting research participants

At this stage it is also possible to shape the research project:

Will you be conducting a survey?

Will you require a website poll?

Will interviews take place remotely, or in person?

Following this session, it is always worth codifying the outcomes and sharing them with stakeholders, so the direction of travel is clear.

Step 2: Creating your discussion guide

Of course, you’re going to need some questions for your interviews. I’ve found it’s best to put these into a discussion guide, translated from the research objectives, which tends to follow this structure:

Introduction: Your chance to introduce yourself and who you are working on behalf of. It gives the user a clear picture of what the interview will be about, why it is being held and what the outcomes of the research will be. It is also a good time to check that the user is happy for their conversation to be recorded and if they have any questions before you begin. Building rapport: Many users will be nervous at the start of the interview, which can cause them to clam up if you start asking probing questions right away. I’ve found that it is best to open with a general question, something light such as what they do for a living, what does their day look like etc. This can help to make them more comfortable before the interview begins in earnest, so they open up more. Exploratory questions: The meat of the interview; here it is best to have a set of topics served by broad introductory questions. Once the user is discussing a particular topic, you can ask follow-up questions to build the detail around research areas or the qualitative insight you are hoping to gain in response to the research objectives. Close: Once you have everything you need from the user it is, of course, important to thank them for their time. If you have offered an incentive, now is also the time to give them details of how this will be fulfilled and in what timeframe. Finally, you should ask the user if they have any questions and let them know that they can contact you in future if any further information comes up.

Step 3: Recruiting and Arranging interviews

There are several methods of recruiting users to take part in research (too many to cover here), but typically, some form of incentive is helpful, as is utilising existing customer data as that audience is likely to be warmer. An effective way to recruit for interviews is to use a question at the end of your survey, so you can select from existing data to cherry pick interviewees that will be most valuable to the research project.

Arranging interviews can be a bit of a logistical nightmare with laborious outreach and a fair amount of Outlook tennis. In recent years, I’ve been using a tool called You Can Book Me, which has made organising interviews much easier. Essentially, it allows you to create a calendar of bookable slots that is accessible via an individual URL, you send the URL out to participants, they choose a time that suits them and (with the help of some integrations) it pops calendar invites into diaries and sets up Zoom calls.

(Above) An example You Can Book Me landing page. The user selects a time, adds their details and then scheduling is automated.

You Can Book Me really does take the sting out of the logistics of arranging interviews and through automated scheduling, reminders, and rearranging functionality, makes life much easier!

Step 4: Conducting interviews

With an extensive discussion guide you should be well prepared for your interviews in terms of what you need to say and the questions you need to ask. The difficult part of any interview is to maintain active listening throughout so that you can take accurate notes. If you have the luxury of a dedicated notetaker, great, but in situations where you are both the interviewer and notetaker, it is important to take light notes so that you can listen to responses and really understand what the user is trying to say.

There are a wide range of notetaking styles to follow when conducting interviews, but the approach that works for me is using sticky notes to quickly jot down the pertinent points and any direct quotes (if you miss anything, note down the time so you can go back and check your recording afterwards). I’ve started using a virtual whiteboard called Miro for notetaking as it has a quick add feature for sticky notes, which makes it much easier to maintain active listening while taking notes. It also handily lays out the sticky notes on a virtual whiteboard for analysis later down the line.

(Above) Interview notes per interview, colour coded by theme.

Step 5: Analysis

You can make analysis easier by ensuring your whiteboard is set up in a way that allows you to quickly arrange and group notes during the analysis process. In Miro, I tend to create an area for each interview that I can quickly add sticky notes. Immediately after the interview, I colour code the notes based on the topics in my discussion guide, clarifying any of my notes while the context is still fresh in my mind.

With colour coded notes for every interview, it is much easier (and faster) to arrange them into broad subject groups and group each note by theme/colour. Once notes have been grouped by their broader themes, you can then dive into each theme and conduct further categorisation in detail, splitting the notes into the sub-groups that will eventually become your main findings.

(Above) Grouped notes by theme (first row) and notes grouped by sub-category into research findings.

With notes organised in this way it is just a case of looking at each of your sub-groups, summarising them into a research finding and including that within your research document. As a sidenote, a virtual whiteboard with search functionality also makes it easier to find those killer anecdotal quotes that support statistical findings.

Conclusion

This is obviously just one approach to conducting user interviews, but it’s an approach I’ve been using for a few years, and I find it to be the easiest and fastest way to plan, arrange and analyse interviews. Ultimately, I’ve found it to be the most effective way to arrive quickly at meaningful conclusions from this type of research, and my advice to anyone conducting user interviews is to give it a try!

Great Question gets $2.5M seed round to make customer research easier – TechCrunch

Customer research is invaluable for software companies, but there are many obstacles, like finding the right group of people to survey. Great Question wants to make building and talking to their own panels accessible to all companies, no matter their size. The startup, which was part of Y Combinator’s winter 2021 program, announced today that it has raised $2.5 million in seed funding.

Great Question launched in February 2021, and its clients include Linktree, Honeybook, O’Reilly Media and MainStreet. The platform has been used to interview customers about product ideas and strategy, find product-market fit, conduct usability studies on UX designs and see how well marketing landing pages perform. Great Question’s seed round came from investors including Funders Club, January Capital, Nomo VC and Twenty-Two Ventures. Angel investors like Warren Hogarth, co-founder of Empower Finance; Jon Williams, co-founder of Culture Amp and Pyn; Jason Smale, senior vice president of engineering at Zendesk; and Robbie Allan, former group product manager at Intercom also participated.

Before founding Great Question, PJ Murray and Ned Dwyer sold their last startup, web developer marketplace Elto, to GoDaddy in 2015. In an email, Dwyer told TechCrunch that they did very little formal research at Elto. “We would talk to customers, but it wasn’t structured or consistent.”

After joining GoDaddy, however, they became “a lot more rigorous in our approach to building product — we suddenly had a much larger audience, a bigger team and aggressive targets.” Murray and Dwyer also had the advantage of working with GoDaddy’s UX research team.

The two saw an opportunity to make customer research more accessible to product development teams. Dwyer said that if companies outsource to a large UX research provider, the starting price can be $40,000 a year. On the other hand, Great Question’s freemium pricing model includes paid subscription plans for $49 and $199 a month.

Great Question has almost all of the things needed for customer research — survey smart templates, prototype tests, scheduling tools and transcription — in one place, so teams can share information easily. One of its most important features is customer recruitment and filtering tools. Dwyer explained that many UX research companies sell access to panels they have already built. That means clients often get feedback from relatively homogenous groups of people who are not their target customers — for example, college students or stay-at-home parents who signed up to answer surveys so they can earn extra cash or gift cards.

Great Question builds custom landing pages where users can opt into panels, decide what kind of research they want to participate in and how often they are willing to answer questions (for example, the platform automates rolling studies, sending questions to different groups of customers every two weeks). Great Question lets its clients integrate incentives programs, such as Tremendous, to compensate participants with cash or gift cards. But many of the people who participate in research through Great Question are motivated because they want to have a say in products they are already using, or find out first about upcoming releases, Dwyer said.

Once customer panels are created, Great Question provides smart templates for surveys or interviews and automatically schedules them for distribution. This saves clients time. For example, MainStreet approached Great Question when it was preparing to release a product that would change its onboarding flow. The startup, which lets small businesses find and claim tax credits and economic incentives, didn’t have time to perform customer research before the launch. “Within 24 hours of signing up to Great Question they’d booked eight customer interviews — this was over Christmas mind you — and got the usability feedback they needed to iterate on the designs before they went to production,” said Dwyer.

In a statement about the investment, Funders Club co-founder and chief executive officer said Alix Mittal said, “Even the best product and business teams know everyday iteration, large pivots and new launches can be hit or miss. We backed Great Question because they provide the missing tool to effortlessly incorporate customers into product and business decisions and to never miss the mark.”

Pegasus spyware penetrated into phones of journalists, activists, politicians

New Delhi: In India, the numbers of phones belonging to hundreds of journalists, activists, opposition politicians, government officials and business executives were on the snooping list, as were numbers in several other countries in the region, including Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan and Pakistan, the Washington Post reported.

Military-grade spyware licensed by an Israeli firm to governments for tracking terrorists and criminals was used in attempted and successful hacks of 37 smartphones belonging to journalists, human rights activists, business executives and two women close to murdered Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, according to an investigation by The Washington Post and 16 media partners.

Wahington Post said the numbers on the list are unattributed, but reporters were able to identify more than 1,000 people spanning more than 50 countries through research and interviews on four continents: several Arab royal family members, at least 65 business executives, 85 human rights activists, 189 journalists, and more than 600 politicians and government officials — including cabinet ministers, diplomats, and military and security officers. The numbers of several heads of state and Prime Ministers also appeared on the list.

The phones appeared on a list of more than 50,000 numbers that are concentrated in countries known to engage in surveillance of their citizens and also known to have been clients of the Israeli firm, NSO Group, a worldwide leader in the growing and largely unregulated private spyware industry, the investigation found.