There’s a phase early in most product people’s careers where they hear “go interview users\customers” and they think “ok, I’ll ask them what they want.”
Hopefully, that is a temporary phase.
You should talk to your users and customers (current or potential).
You shouldn’t ask for a wish list (often referred to as “gathering requirements”).
Do that and you’ll get a lot of things you could do, but may not actually solve the problem you want to solve.
Nor should you ask them what they would do in a given situation and certainly don’t ask them what they would pay for a potential product.
Do that and you’re inviting the people you’re interviewing to lie to you. They aren’t doing it on purpose, they’re just terrible at predictions, even their own behaviors.
What you should do with user interviews
“Ok wise guy,” you’re probably saying, “so how should I approach user interviews?”
Glad you asked.
When you interview users and customers, you’re much more interested in the problems they face and how they are trying to solve those problems today.
So instead of asking them what they’ll do if they face a particular situation, ask them what they did the last time they faced that situation. And then get all the details around that.
You’re asking them to tell you a story. The stories you get will be more reliably accurate than any prediction that they unwittingly make. In addition, you’ll get plenty of context around the scenario that will be invaluable as you select what problem to solve or decide to build a solution.
On top of all that, you’ll find out why they view certain situations as problems and what it’s worth to them to solve it.
If you ask them what they want, they give you a lot of solution ideas, but without too much explanation about why you should build those things, or even if they add much value.
Research Questions and Interview Questions
And to make sure you’re asking for the right stories, before you interview users and customers, be clear about what you want to find out.
That’s often referred to as a research question. For example, if you’re rebuilding an existing product, one thing you’re going to want to find out is what weird things do your customers use your product for.
But you’re not (hopefully) going to launch into an interview with “In what weird ways do you use our product?” That might not go too well.
Instead, come up with some interview questions that will get your users to tell you stories that give you insights into your research questions. For example, you may ask things like “can you tell me about the last time you used our product? What did you do with it?” and then take the conversation from there.
Example Interview Questions
You can use good interview questions in surveys as well. For a couple of examples, and to provide me some useful information, please take this quick survey about product management newsletters.
I appreciate your feedback. It’ll be very helpful.
User Interviews in different contexts
And as you might expect, the stories you ask for are going to be different depending on different situations.
Creating a new product
When you’re creating a new product, you may interview potential customers and users to uncover what problems they value solving or how they’re currently solving the problem you’re trying to tackle.
Optimizing an existing product
When you’re optimizing an existing product, you interview users to get a better understanding of how they currently use your product, or identify what problems they have that your product could also solve.
You may interview people who stopped using your product to find out why. You could also interview people who aren’t using your product yet to determine what they do to solve the problem you’re addressing.
Replacing an existing product
As I hinted at above, when you’re replacing an existing product, you need to get a handle on how people are currently using your product. You’re especially on the lookout for novel (a kinder way of saying “weird”) uses.
You also want to find out what features people aren’t using so you know you can move those further down the list, or leave them out of the new version altogether.
Other Scenarios
I’m sure there are other scenarios where you’d need to take a different approach to user interviews. If you have one in mind that I didn’t mention, let me know.
The point is to structure your user interviews for your particular context. The resources below provide some great tips on how to structure your user interviews and some good questions to ask.
A survival guide to user interviews
Agata Ageieva takes you through a step-by-step process of how to prepare, run and share successful user interviews. Starting with why you need to outline the fundamental question and ending with how to get your team more interested in the research you’re doing. She also explain about how to understand user motivation, what questions are gold and which ones are absolutely worthless for user research.
Asking Better User Interview Questions
Ant Murphy has always wanted to package up a comprehensive guide to conducting user interviews, namely covering two key topics:
- How to structure a user interview for maximum impact.
- How to design better questions to elicit high-quality responses.
He finally had the chance to put this guide together. It’s a long one, but it’s a valuable guide to anyone who wants to become better at running user interviews. Whether you’re a founder, designer, product manager, or any other role.
How Asking Works: A Crash Course in Customer Discovery Questions
Interviewing strangers is a science as much as an art. Learning how questions actually work can give you fresh insight into the customer discovery process.
The questions we ask (and how we ask them) are the compass of the interview process, guiding the trip in directions most useful to our topic of inquiry (or at the very least preventing us from going in circles). Tristan Kromer describes different questions and when to use each kind.
What Are the Best Customer Interview Questions?
If you’re serious about continuous discovery, one of the most important steps you can take is committing to weekly (at a minimum) touch points with your customers.
Taking this step involves making many big changes. It means identifying the right people to talk to, automating the recruiting process, synthesizing what you learn during interviews, and for many people, completely changing the way you interview.
Remember: We’re all susceptible to bias, both when describing our own behavior and gathering insights from the interviews we conduct.
Story-based interviewing helps you overcome some of that bias by prompting your customers to share a specific example of a past behavior rather than a generalized explanation of what they think they do.
This approach also helps limit your bias by focusing on the customer’s context. Instead of asking customers about the specifics of your product—and potentially opening yourselves up to the escalation of commitment bias or confirmation bias where you fall in love with your own ideas and ignore any evidence that contradicts them—you put the spotlight on your customers and their experiences.
Teresa Torres explores how to make sure your interviews accomplish this.
Research Questions Are Not Interview Questions
You can’t just ask people what you want to know.
Once you have identified a good research question and decided that interviewing people is the best way to answer it, you need to figure out what to ask the people you are interviewing. As Erika Hall reminds us, research questions are not interview questions. If you have a strong research question in mind, you might not even need many specific interview questions.