Tips for Conducting Effective User Interviews

You only think you know what a user wants. The only way you're going to know for sure is to ask the user. Seems obvious, huh? Knowing what to ask and how to ask it can be stumbling blocks to getting to the information you want. This excerpt from Anderson, McRee, Wilson, et al.'s Effective UI will help you prepare for conducting effective user interviews.

We rarely conduct or recommend user research through group sessions or focus groups. The dynamics of the group and the difference in people's behavior within the group tends to lead to overly general or skewed information. The best information comes through one-on-one interactions with the users in the space where they will actually use the product. User interviews should also be comfortable and conversational, rather than formal and rigid. The goal is to elicit honest and insightful information from the users in whatever directions that might take you—not to simply work through a predetermined set of interview questions.

The user researcher will prepare interview questions based on what they know from the project's mission, business requirements, and key user attributes. The questions are open-ended and flexible, and during the interview, the researcher invites meandering discussions. This openness allows the user to introduce subjects and questions the researcher might not have anticipated, which enriches that interview and all subsequent ones. The researcher is there to listen and nudge the user occasionally to get important insights into the user's goals, the context in which the user uses the product, and the user's primary concerns and pain points. The researcher will also be trying to establish an empathic rapport with the user and get herself into the user's shoes in preparation for the task of helping the rest of the team get into the same position.

As the researchers complete more and more interviews, they'll start to get a clearer picture of the problem and know better what questions they should be asking and what issues they should be exploring. If they find something interesting midway through the interviews and start asking questions about it for the remaining interviewees, they'll probably want to go back to the prior interviewees to confirm the pattern and strengthen the data. So it's valuable to ask each research subject at the end of the interview for permission to contact them again to follow up. This can be as simple as making a phone call or sending a brief survey of follow-up questions.