A quick guide to running user interviews
Photo by Christina @ wocintechchat.com on Unsplash
This guide is for anyone looking to fine-tune their research skills: product managers, researchers, and designers.
Interviews are a valuable way to develop empathy; they help you learn about the situational context, mindsets, motivations, and behaviors of the people you are designing for. Interviewing was my introduction to user research, and over the years I’ve developed this list of guidelines to help others with their practice.
Be curious
Craft the discussion
Run the interview
Debrief
Be curious
Firstly, take a moment to reorient your thinking, this is your time to be curious and open. You don’t have pressure to come up with ideas or solve problems, you just need to listen and observe.
This is the time to let your interview participants be the star of the show. In this conversation you are not the expert, they are. Avoid making assumptions, remember, you don’t know what you don’t know. Instead, ask open-ended questions that let the participant give you anecdotal evidence and bring you into their world. A good way to keep yourself in check is to document your assumptions and return to follow up later in the interview.
Avoid bias
There are many different kinds of biases to be aware of while you’re conducting interviews. Some biases are harder to spot than others, but it is important to have an understanding of them to limit bias in your interview questions as well as any tertiary questions that may come up through your users’ answers.
Avoid leading questions
Participants could presume there is a response you are looking to hear rather than being open to hearing their personal response.
Instead of this: “Was your experience with Company A good?”
Do this: “Can you tell me about your experience with Company A?”
Instead of this: “Do you eat apples because they are healthy?”
Do this: “Why do you choose to eat apples?”
Start broad and then narrow in
Ordering questions in the discussion guide incorrectly can also generate bias. For example, if you narrow in too early, you are at risk of missing all the context that may have influenced the situation or hearing about what is truly important to your participant.
Understand interviewer bias
Interviewer bias takes many different forms. Sometimes it’s assuming what your participant will say, and cutting them off before they’ve had the chance to provide more detail. Other times it can be simply changing your tone or reacting noticeably to something they’ve said. These subtle queues can indicate that their response was desirable or undesirable which can influence how they choose to respond to the question.
Remain neutral
Be careful not to conduct your synthesis with preconceived notions. Looking for particular patterns rather than finding patterns within the data you have is a form of confirmation bias.
Craft the discussion
Identify goals
Be clear about what you want to learn. Are you looking for a broad understanding or a deep one? Are you interested in learning about all your users or just a subset? Having clear scope and goals will help you craft a research study that will ensure you are getting the insights you need.
Build the guide
The guide is not a survey, a good guide helps you stay on topic but shouldn’t be used to dictate a rigid conversation. It’s important to give the participant breathing room to share stories about what’s important to them, remember you don’t know what you don’t know. This might mean that you cover the topics in your discussion guide out of order — and that’s ok. It’s your job to keep track of what you’ve covered and what you haven’t and redirect the conversation when necessary.
Be respectful of the participant’s time
Generally, it's good practice to run an interview for 45–60mins. This is ample time to have a valuable conversation, but not too long for the participant to lose interest. A guide that’s about 2 pages should generate a 45–60min interview.
Use appropriate language
If speaking to external customers, avoid using internal language that may not be familiar to them.
Ask open-ended questions
These promote storytelling and get to the “why” behind a situation/behavior/emotion.
“In as much detail as you can, tell me about your experience with x..?”
“Was there anything that you found particularly frustrating?”
Probe for the underlying motivation
Qualitative research is about understanding the person, their underlying thoughts, beliefs, and motivations. I have a few phrases I use to help tease this out of people.
“Why did you use that phrase?”
“Can you tell me more about that?”
“Can you give me an example?”
Run the interview
Don’t crowd the participant
My rule of thumb for an in-person interview is 3 people. 1 interviewer, 1 note taker (research support), and the participant.
These days with remote work it’s a little easier to expand this group. For online, remote interviews it’s easier to bring more people into the process, which has the added bonus of building awareness and advocacy for research insights. However, there are some ground rules. Keep the invite list small. To help keep the participant focused on the interviewer, only the participant and interviewer should have their cameras on, any guests should remain on mute with their camera off. Set expectations with guests that they will have a few minutes at the end of the interview to ask any pressing follow-up questions — this ensures that the guests feel included but don’t interrupt during the interview.
If possible, delegate a separate person as a note taker
This will free you up to focus on the interview and help bring others into the interview process, building advocacy for the findings.
Set expectations
Introduce yourself to the participant, mention anyone else who will be listening to the conversation, and indicate the broad/high-level topic(s) you’ll be covering in the conversation (but be careful not to share your hypothesis as this could skew the interview).
Ask permission to record
Explain that recordings won’t be shared publicly, and findings will be anonymized before being shared back to the organization.
Build rapport
Taking 5 minutes to ask your user some conversational questions about themselves, their day, and what they like to do in their free time makes them feel more comfortable and puts them into the mindset of answering questions about themselves. It also has the added bonus of building a little extra context for the interview.
Facilitate the conversation
Keep an eye on the original goals of the study. Are you covering the topics you need to? Be prepared to bring the participant back to the key topics if the conversation drifts into areas that aren’t related to your goals. Here are some phrases you can use to guide the conversation:
“Thanks so much for this detail, I wanted to jump back to something you said earlier.”
“I’m also curious to learn about x.”
Silence is ok
Don’t be afraid to take a pause. People generally feel the need to fill the pause in a conversation. Pauses are a technique used by researchers, that invites the participant to open up and provide more information.
Never correct the participant
Remember in this context they are the expert and correcting them can erode rapport. If you find that they are misinterpreting something, that’s something to take note of, it might indicate a lack of clarity in the product or experience.
Wrap up
Once I’m comfortable I’ve covered all by key topic areas. I always ask the participant if they have any final thoughts or comments, or if there is anything that we didn’t cover that they want to share. Sometimes participants will take this one final opportunity to reaffirm what’s really important to them or share something that they hadn’t been aware of earlier.
Debrief
Key takeaways
As soon as possible following the interview, it's good practice to gather the team and run a quick debrief. Use this time to clarify what was heard, and align on key takeaways. Jotting these down after the interview will help with synthesis later, and act as a quick summary for anyone who wasn’t able to attend the interview themselves.
