So you want to learn about your users?

New! “Want to learn more?” section added Jul 10, 2022‍

Whether you’re working on a first design or a re-design, conducting user interviews is a great way to learn about people’s motivations, goals and expectations so you can make evidence-based design decisions.

You already know the business goals and now you’re about to start designing the product, or the website that will market the product. Since you’re reading this, you understand that the best way to design something that will be easy to use and resonate with people is to get information about them, firsthand. Knowing that is half the battle and this article will help you through the other half.

User interviews can help you find out…

How people perform a task
Why people do what they do
What people have found frustrating
What has worked well for people
What could make their experiences better

This article doesn’t cover design research, where you evaluate your design ideas by doing usability testing . However, at the end I included, “Want to learn more?” with lots of resources for all types of UX research.

Photo of two people sitting in a room in front of a window with one person facilitating an in-person user interview. — Photo by Christina @ wocintechchat.com on Unsplash

Get ready!

Before you start your user interviews, you have some work to do first.

Set a clear goal.

‍Decide what you want to learn about your users and make it focused enough that you can complete each one-on-one interview in about 30 minutes. Let’s say you’re designing a recipe management app. Your goal may be to learn:

How people manage their handwritten, online, and cookbook recipes
How they find new recipes and ingredient substitutions
What’s their favorite recipe apps
How they share paper versus online recipes.

But, having a variety of topics will be too much to cover in these short, low-stress interviews. Narrow your goal down to 1 or 2 topics.

You can have multiple rounds of interviews to address additional topics. The first round may focus on online recipes, second round for paper recipes, and third round for cookbook recipes.

Having a laser focused goal will help you stay on track during the interviews and make analyzing your findings much easier.

List your questions.

‍Write down questions you’ll ask each person, but be flexible. You may have written 8 questions and when you ask the first question, a really lively person may answer 4 of them. In which case, you’ll want to be flexible and skip over the questions they answered. On the other hand, you could ask a question and the person brings up something you hadn’t thought to ask, so you may need to ask a few unplanned questions.

Recruit some people.

‍Find people who need your product or service and be sure to include people with diverse lived experiences. I encourage you to intentionally seek social identities that are often overlooked — marginalized ages, gender identities, sexual orientations, disabilities, ethnicities… as they are applicable to your product or service, of course.

To recruit various social identities, try reaching out to organizations and online communities specific to each. Be respectful and upfront about what you’re designing, the types of questions you have, and how talking with people in that social group can help you design a product that meets their needs and expectations. You may be surprised by people’s willingness to participate. Alternatively, you can pay for a recruiting service. Some options include: User Interviews, Askable, UsabilityHub, Ethnio.

Plan the logistics.

‍Decide where to interview. Are you doing in-person meetings at a coffee shop, a phone call, or video-conferencing? Determine if you are going to, or need to, pay for participants.

If you plan to record the session’s audio and video or just audio, be sure to ask for permission. If you’re not recording the session, be aware that it can be challenging to ask questions, listen to answers, and write notes at the same time. It can be done, but if a friend is willing to be a silent notetaker, you’ll greatly appreciate it.

Prepare yourself.

‍It’s important to have an open mind. User interviews should challenge our assumptions about people because our assumptions are often wrong. If we conduct interviews with the intention to confirm our existing beliefs, we will definitely confirm them. This can result in bad design decisions based on those faulty assumptions. So, be ready and eager to learn and listen more than you speak.

User interviews should uncover insights to help you meet user needs in addition to the business goals.

Photo of a virtual meeting with an interviewer writing notes on a notepad. — Photo by Julia M Cameron from Pexels

Questions to ask…

User interviews should be one-on-one meetings, plus maybe a notetaker. You’ll want to start each session by thanking them for their willingness to participate, ask if you are pronouncing their name correctly, and introduce yourself. And, if you state your pronouns, they may feel comfortable to state their own (or they may not, which is fine too).

Ask one or two warm-up questions to break the ice, such as “What is your favorite website or application?” or something you think will be relevant to them. Then, very briefly explain why you’re doing the interview and be careful not to say so much that you influence how they respond to some of your questions. Lastly, ask if they have any questions, then whip out your list of questions, which should be:

Open-ended questions

The more people talk, the more you learn about what they do and why they do it. So you’ll want to avoid close-ended yes or not questions. Most of your questions should start with: What…? How…? Why…? Can you describe…? Can you explain…?

Instead of: Did you find the [item]?
Ask: Can you tell me about your experience looking for [item]?

About past experiences

Encourage people to tell you a story about a past experience with a question like, “Can you tell me about a time when…?” This will get them talking about what initiated a particular action, the steps they went through, what worked well, pain points and how they felt along the way. Stories about past experiences are likely to provide you with a wealth of insights.

Show-me questions

When you have the opportunity to watch people perform an action, consider it a gift. If you’re talking to people about ordering flowers online, you might:

Ask: Remember the last time you ordered flowers online? Can you show me how you…?”

Then watch them walk through go through the steps on a desktop or mobile phone. Of course, you’ll have them stop short of making the purchase, but you’re likely to notice details that they may not have mentioned in conversation.

Probing questions

Sometimes people are unsure how much detail to provide and give brief answers, such as “I like shopping online.” You can encourage them to talk more by asking a probing question:

Ask: Can you tell me more about…?
Ask: Can you tell me why you…?

There’s also the echo technique, which is often used in usability testing, where you repeat what they said as a question:

Person: It was hard to find [item].
You: It was hard to find?

The goal is to get actionable insights by finding not just what they do but why they do it. By doing so, we learn what people value and how the design meets, or misses their expectations.

Inclusion questions

Learning how past experiences have made people feel included or excluded can be tricky. Because of the sensitive nature, you should not ask a direct question about disabilities or discrimination, but may you get the conversation going by asking a question like:

Ask: When has a brand or product made you feel seen and understood?
Ask: When has a brand or product made you feel uncomfortable or overlooked?

These are suggestions and not magic questions. If they seem confused or reluctant to answer, you can say, “No worries, the information you’ve provided has been very helpful,” then move on to the next question.

Feelings of inclusion or exclusion may not feel relevant to some people, may not be front of mind for others, and may not be a topic that some people are willing to talk about.

For example: When I asked one person the above question about feeling seen and understood, the topic definitely was not front of mind when they said, “You mean like Häagen-Dazs ice cream bars?” — I actually love that answer. The question was clear and relevant for next person who responded, “Nubian skin makes bras for darker skin tones, which I really appreciate.” So, mileage will vary.

Learn more in my article about inclusive UX research and design.
‍

Photo of a person sitting at a desk, taking notes during a phone user interview. — Photo by Zen Chung from Pexels

Questions to avoid…

During the user interviews, you’ll want to be careful to minimize the risks of biasing your participants, so avoid asking these types of questions:

Close-ended questions

You want people to give you lots of details about what they do and why, right? So, as previously discussed, you’ll want to ask open-ended questions. Close-ended questions aren’t “bad,” so you can use them from time to time.

A qualifying question like, “Do you shop online using your mobile phone?” can let you know if the next question is relevant to them or not. If they say, you’d follow-up with an open-ended question.

Future predictions‍

People are bad at trying to predict future behavior and feelings. This is due to a variety of biases that lead to affective forecasting errors. What people say they would like or would do, rarely holds true. So, you’ll want to avoid questions like, “In the future, would you…?”

Nikki Anderson wrote a great article about this topic: Asking about the future in user research.

Subjective questions

Questions such as “Do you like…?” and “Do you want…?” can have you chasing unicorns and rainbows. Instead, you want to ask about past experiences — as mentioned above — to encourage people to talk about how a product or service met their needs.

When people say how their needs were met (e.g., helpful, easy to use, convenient, or fast) those descriptions can be used as quality measures for the success of your product or service.

Design questions

Avoid asking people to make design decisions, like “Would you rather have…?” since user interviews are not the right setting. If you want users to design, you should conduct a participatory design session. Then, you can provide them with guidance and instructions so their design suggestions account for context and constraints.

Leading questions

Asking questions like include descriptive words can influence a person’s perspective and result in biased answers. Rephrase such questions by inquiring about their thoughts and feelings.

Instead of: How much better is that feature?
Ask: What do you think about that feature?
Instead of: Was that frustrating?
Ask: How did you feel during that experience?

Wrap it up

At the end, be sure to thank them again, briefly tell then what you plan to do with the information, and ask them if they have anything else they would like to share.

Once you’ve completed the interviews, you’ll want to organize all the information you’ve gathered. If you recorded the session, you’ll have the extra step of watching or listening to all of the interviews and taking notes. Once you have all of those notes, you’ll want to group key points in a meaningful way to find trends and themes, which will help you to make informed design decisions.

For more information on how to review your user interview findings, check out this video: Thematic Analysis of Qualitative User Research Data.

Want to learn more?

Articles

10 Tips on how to get started with inclusive UX research practice
UXinsight
Methods in Madness
Dovetail
People Nerds
dscout
User Interviews: How, When, and Why to Conduct Them
NN/g
User Research
Adobe
User Research Methods: Articles & Videos
Nielsen Norman Group

Be a User Research Participant

Books

100 Things Every Designer Need to Know About People
by Susan, Weinschenk, PhD
Don’t Make Me Think
by Steve Krug
I want a UX job!: How to make a career change into UX research
by Lauryl Zenobi
Just Enough Research
by Erika Hall
Think Like a UX Researcher (PDF)
by David Travis and Philip Hodgson

Conferences & Events

Final Thoughts

I must admit that user interviews are my favorite part of the UX process; before designing or coding anything. It’s an opportunity to gather valuable answers to a lot of questions, which helps me and the development team design the right thing in the right way. User interviews take the guesswork out of designing.

Enjoy user interviewing!

‍

Thanks for reading. If you know anyone who would find this useful, please share. If you have any questions or feedback, feel free to contact me.

‍