The phrase “user interviews” may sound serious, but it’s a very simple concept. In short, user interviews are simply structured conversations with the target users of your product, service, or experience. User interviews are closely related to the design thinking methodology, which puts the user (or customer) at the heart of the decision-making or design process.

The purpose of user interviews is to understand more about the people you want to serve through your product. Through your interviews, you aim to understand their pain points, hopes, and needs. All of this information helps you design more relevant, meaningful, and desirable experiences.

In the past, it was commonplace for many companies to design products or experiences without this critical perspective. Instead, decisions were based on gut reactions or the business bottom line above all else—What does our internal team think we need? What is our boss telling us to do? Or, what can we do quickly?

None of these approaches starts with the most important person—the end-user. The design thinking mindset encourages everyone involved with creating something— whether that “something” is an app, a retail experience, an online service, or a medication—to approach their work first from a place of empathy. And one of the quickest, most effective ways to gain empathy is through user interviews.

When is it a good time for user interviews?

User interviews are conducted throughout all stages of a design project or initiative. However, the goals behind your research and the type of questions you ask will shift depending on where you’re at in your work and what you want to accomplish.

Here are a few examples of when to conduct user interviews:

• At the beginning of a project: When you first kick off an initiative, it’s definitely time to host user interviews with a representative group of customers. During this phase, the goal of your user interviews is usually very generative and open. You want to understand your product or problem space from the users’ perspective.
• In the middle of a project: A project’s mid-point is also a great time for user interviews. At this point, you hopefully have some concepts (even just sketches or basic wireframes) or prototypes to show your users. The goal of the user interviews here is to ask questions that will help you refine your ideas to align with what the customer/user wants and to understand if you’re going in the right direction.
• When you’ve launched something: User interviews don’t stop once you’ve produced an experience and put it out into the market. In fact, your user interviews might become more important now. At this point, user interviews help you perfect and refine your existing product and test out new or future features.
• During a Design Sprint: At Voltage Control, we are experts in facilitating the five-day Design Sprint method. This a one-week process, originally developed at Google Ventures, leads a team through a collaborative set of activities to create a solution to an existing business problem. In five short days, you do research, insight gathering, concepting, and prototyping. On the Friday of a Design Sprint, you typically interview five users to get their feedback on your rapid prototype.

What are the benefits of user interviews?

1. Get learnings before it’s too late

When you don’t conduct user interviews and you jump right into designing solutions, you might head off in the wrong direction. This can be a costly mistake. Talking to users upfront helps point you in the right direction and focuses your efforts on solutions that you have a strong hunch will be useful to your customers or end-users.

2. It only takes a handful

User interviews don’t have to be a lengthy, time-consuming part of your design process. You can gather such rich information in a few days or a week of interviews. You don’t need to interview 20 or 100 people. Interview 5–10 people with different perspectives, ages, and backgrounds. You’ll start to hear common themes and issues from this small subset of users.

3. Get out of your routine (and the office)

Another benefit of user interviews is that they shake up your typical modes of working—meetings, meetings, and more meetings. Talking with your users is incredibly inspiring and can reenergize teams. It’s even better if you can interview people outside of the office and in their homes or another neutral setting.

4. Back up your ideas with stories

A final benefit of user interviews is that they provide stories, quotes, and narratives that you can use to back up your ideas when you are trying to “sell” a feature or experience. When you can tell your colleagues that you created something specifically because a user showed a need for it, your ideas will have more power and weight.

How do you structure a user interview?

Before you hold a user interview, you’ll have to write an interview guide or protocol. This is the list of questions and topics you want to cover in your conversation. Be sure to think carefully about how you want to open and close your conversation, as well as the topics you need to hit in the time you have with your participant. (Typically, interviews are somewhere between 30–90 minutes long.)

In the Design Sprint, we follow something called the “5 Act Interview” when we talk to people about the prototype. It’s a basic interview structure that covers all the essentials and can be easily adapted or tweaked if you are doing another type of research. If you want to learn more about the 5 Act interview, I’ve outlined it in this article.

If you’re running interviews as part of a Design Sprint, and even if you’re not, we designed a scorecard that helps you take interview notes and synthesize the findings coming out of user research.

How do I find participants for user interviews?

When you’ve been sold on the need for, and benefits of, user research and you’ve done some preparation, it’s time to find and schedule your interview participants.

There are many ways to find participants for user interviews, some more formal than others.

Option 1: Friends and Family
Write up a simple description of the type of people you’re looking for (i.e. millennials who don’t have smartphones) and then send emails out to people you know and/or post your request on your social media feed. Consider creating a simple survey through something like Google Forms, Survey Monkey, or TypeForm to make sure that people have the qualities and background you’re looking for.

Option 2: Recruiting Companies: 
If you need more help or if your users are very niche and/or hard to find, you can also consider hiring professional recruiting agencies to find and schedule your interviewees. There are many companies out there, both old and new, local and national, but we’d recommend checking out dScout and Respondent.

Do you want expert help with user interviews, innovation workshops, or a Design Sprint? Let’s talk.

Voltage Control facilitates events of all kinds, including design thinking workshops, innovation sessions, and Design Sprints. Please reach out to us at info@voltagecontrol.co for a consultation.

The post Everything You Want to Know About Running User Interviews appeared first on Voltage Control.

This is part of my workshop recipe series where I’ll be sharing methods for facilitating successful workshops. I’ll break down the essentials of a Design Sprint, Innovation Workshop, Leadership Retreats, Executive Summits, and more. Check out the others here.

Whether you are conducting a Design Sprint or simply exploring a new idea or product, the user interview is that key moment when you test your prototype.

I’ve led hundreds of user interviews in my work as an innovation consultant. Through them, I’ve made missteps, learned a ton, and created straightforward tools that help me and my team at every moment of the process.

If I had a manifesto for user interviews it would be this: A deliberate, scientific approach is critical. A consistent process, plus an unbiased mindset yields realistic feedback. Effective scoring gives clarity to the results and primes you to make strategic decisions.

Below, I share how to approach planning and leading user interviews. Skip the learning curve and learn from my experiences!

The Methods

1. Recruit Interview Subjects

Estimated time commitment: 8 hours

Identifying who needs to be interviewed is essential. Define and isolate your target persona to begin your search. Some teams have dedicated researchers or partners that handle recruiting for them. If you don’t have a dedicated resource, you’ll need to personally locate your testers.

Outcomes

1. Recruit qualified interview subjects.
2. Disqualify “professional” survey takers.
3. Create targeted screener and ideal user types to interview.

Method Steps

1. Review Sprint Questions, Goal, and Target
2. List out disqualifying attributes and qualities
3. List out qualifying attributes
4. Write a screener containing questions targeting your qualifying and disqualifying attributes
5. Publish screener to http://respondent.io or similar service
6. Make an interview and “floater” schedule
7. Review & invite participants
8. Review & invite floaters

2. Plan the Interview

Estimated time commitment: 60 Minutes

The official Voltage Control Sprint Moderator Guide helps you get the most out of your 5-Act user interviews. When testing with 5 users, it’s critical that you run the interviews properly. This template is simple to use: open it and simply make a copy and rename it. Then follow the steps included to set it up for your interview.

Outcomes

1. Save time by using a prepared template for interviews.
2. Document the key questions and target of the sprint for reference during interviews.
3. Outlining your prototype’s click path structures the interview effectively.
4. Proven context questions unlock the interview subject’s insights.

Method Steps

1. Download the guide.
2. Clone the guide.
3. Customize the guide for your test.
4. Print and study the guide.
5. Follow the guide when running your interview.

PROTIP: Read more about the guide.

3. Master the Interview

Estimated time commitment: 30 Minutes

Becoming a great researcher begins with a commitment to the continual evolution of your interviewing skills. Critique your last interview — think about how it went and what you can do better. Apply your learnings to your next interview!

Outcomes

1. Improve your abilities as a researcher.
2. Follow repeatable rituals to make every interview consistent and effective.
3. Prevent bias by remaining an independent moderator.
4. Maximize for honest, unfiltered, insightful feedback from subjects.

Method Steps

1. Screen and select participants carefully. Make sure subjects are aligned with a target persona.
2. Create an interview outline and moderator guide so you can cover all essential points in the allotted time.
3. Ask context questions and build rapport with subjects to remove any pressure or stress.
4. Disassociate yourself from prototype so that honest feedback emerges.
5. Don’t sweat the small things, focus on value and remember to ask why.
6. Avoid Yes/No questions. Leave it open-ended.
7. Ask subjects to repeat themselves as necessary to validate their response.
8. Be flexible, allow for new questions and paths to emerge.
9. Don’t forget to debrief with subjects to get final insights. Ask questions like how they would explain the prototype in their own words and what they would change.

Want to know more? Check out my article here.

4. Conduct the 5 Act Interview

Estimated time commitment: 5 Hours

The 5 Act Interview is a structured 1-on-1 interview format developed at Google Ventures as part of their Design Sprint workshop methodology. The moderator builds a narrative arc that walks users through a high fidelity prototype to gain valuable insights. By immersing your user in the experience, you increase the chances to get the most realistic feedback.

Outcomes

1. A structured, repeatable, and proven interview process.
2. Open-ended, but focused, questions elicit deep understanding of a user’s experience.
3. Run your usability studies with methods from Google and Google Ventures.

Method Steps

1. Build rapport and create comfort with your participant. Start with a friendly welcome to engage the participant. Simple questions such as age, occupation, and interests build momentum at the interview’s beginning.
2. Ask context questions about the current problem the user is facing or their past experiences.
3. Introduce the prototype and remind the user to provide candid feedback, i.e. “I did not design this product. Nothing you say will flatter me or hurt my feelings. I am interested in what you are experiencing today.”
4. Create tasks that allow you to gain insights into the questions you identified as being important to your sprint. Seek to understand the customer’s experience, not specific features. For example, ask “What would you do when you are finished shopping?”
5. Follow up about the task. Ask questions like: “What were you expecting to happen?” or “What would you do next?”
6. Debrief by reiterating some of the insights you have observed during the interview. Ask things like: “How would you describe this to a friend?”, “Who is this for?”, or “What would you change about the experience today?”

5. Score the Interview

Estimated time commitment: 45 Minutes

The Voltage Control Scorecard is a shared Google Sheet that all of your interview observers can use to take interview notes simultaneously. Start with digital notes so you don’t have to type up a bunch of handwritten notes later. Assign a worksheet to each sprinter, so everyone has their own workspace, yet can see each other’s work.

Outcomes

1. Eliminate the need to transcribe Post-its or other analog note-taking methods.
2. Make interview outcomes and results instantly visible.
3. Timestamps make it easier to review the interview recordings afterward.
4. A shared team workspace creates more transparency.

Method Steps

1. Download the Voltage Control Scorecard.
2. Click on the worksheet with your name on it.
3. At the top, you’ll see columns for each tester and the rows of Y/N questions. On the bottom, you’ll see an empty section for recording insights.
4. Take a moment to read each of the Y/N questions.
5. While observing the interview, if you can confidently answer any of the Y/N questions with a Yes or No, record your answer. If the tester wasn’t completely clear or said contradictory things, mark that question with a “?” for that question. If the topic didn’t come up at all, leave it empty.
6. When you hear interesting, provocative, or concerning things from the testers, record them in the insights section at the bottom.
7. For each insight, use the drop down to select the current tester’s name, enter the timestamp using the hotkey, and type in the insight.
8. Repeat for all interviews.

PROTIP: Learn more about the Voltage Control Scorecard

I hope my step-by-step guide to planning and conducting user interviews is helpful for you! Please let me know how you used or evolved any of the tools here.

This recipe first appeared in Google’s Design Sprint Kit.

The post The Step-by-Step Guide to Leading Insightful User Interviews appeared first on Voltage Control.