5. How to Conduct User Interviews

Read time: 5 mins

User interviews can be a great way to extract information from users so as to understand their user experience as well as the product’s usability and the design ideation. They are cheap and easy to conduct. Better still, anyone who is able to ask questions and record the answers can conduct them.

Author/Copyright holder: Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung. Copyright terms and license: CC BY-SA 2.0

One of the best ways to get information from users is the good old-fashioned interview. Pen and paper are still excellent tools for taking down any kind of feedback.

Before we look at how to conduct user interviews, we need to examine some of the drawbacks of interviewing:

• Interviews, even if they are contextual (i.e., based on observing the interviewee using the product prior to interview), tend to give insights into what people say they will do, and this is sometimes (often even) not the same as what they actually do.
• Human beings have memory issues and can often not recall details as clearly as they would like. Unfortunately, it is a human tendency to try and create these details (this is not even a conscious process) and to tell a story the way we think something happened rather than how it happened.
• Users aren’t designers. Interviewers should stick to concrete examination of what is happening and how the users feel. We should not try and get them to create their ideal product or to suggest improvements.

It’s important to keep these drawbacks in mind when designing your interview questions (or when making up interview questions on the spot while examining what you have observed the user doing). You should also take them into account when evaluating a group of user interviews – interview data gives you a starting point to examine problems but rarely a finishing point which delivers 100% certainty as to what to do next.

“Know thy user, and you are not the user.”
— Arnie Lund, the author of User Experience Management

Keeping these words in mind will come in very handy—the users you encounter in this light may be a far cry from how you had imagined them or their behavior concerning what you’re offering them. Consequently, user interviews are a great way to get to know your users.

What is a User Interview?

User interviews are where a researcher asks questions of, and records responses from, users. We can use these to examine the user experience, the usability of the product or to flesh out demographic or ethnographic data (for input into user personas), among many other things.

Author/Copyright holder: Liz Danzico. Copyright terms and license: Fair Use.

These three components make up effective notetaking. Deducing the reasons behind a user’s actions involves such a process.

The ideal interview takes place with two UX researchers and one user. The first UX researcher focuses on asking questions and guiding the interviewee through the interview. The second takes notes. If a second researcher is unavailable for this, then videoing or audio recording an interview can be a good way to record the information elicited. If the researcher asking questions takes notes, there’s a good chance that the interview will be derailed and become hard to manage. So, if you are working alone, don’t look on reviewing the recording of the interview as double-handling; it’s really the only way to capture and condense what you need into a workable format.

Typical topics covered within user interviews include:

• Background (such as ethnographic data)
• The use of technology in general
• The use of the product
• The user’s main objectives and motivations
• The user’s pain points

Don’t feel limited to these topics. If there’s something you need to know that you can learn by asking your users (as long as it’s not offensive or threatening), you can ask a question about it.

There is also a special type of user interview known as ‘the contextual interview’. This is an interview which is conducted after (or during) the observation of a user using the actual product. It’s an interview ‘in context’ with usage. These are very common in usability testing and assessment of products and even in information visualization. Unsurprisingly, the insights you can gain from first-hand, ‘live’ user experience can prove very valuable, not least because you can almost guarantee responses that are totally accurate and earnest.

Author/Copyright holder: RezScore. Copyright terms and license: Fair Use

Interviewing users, as is the case with interviewing people for other purposes, throws open the doors into the person’s world, affording us precious insights as interviewers—insights we can analyze and apply in the adaption of the product in question so as to make it more successful.

Preparing for User Interviews

Preparation for user interviews begins with recruitment. In order to capture an accurate picture of your usership, you will want to ensure that you recruit a representative sample of users for your interviews.

Then you will need to create a script from which to ask questions (unless you are doing a contextual interview, in which case you may still create a script but are likely to wander off-piste from that script a lot during the interview).

Some tips for your script include:

• Make sure you begin by explaining the purpose of the interview – what are you trying to achieve?
• Also explain how the person’s data and any data you collect will be used from the interview.
• Try to keep leading questions to a minimum. A good question is “Do you use instant messaging?” rather than “How often do you use Snapchat?”— The former lets you explore what users actually do. The latter presupposes that users are using Snapchat and that’s the extent of their instant messaging activity.
• Keep it reasonably short. If you read the script aloud and it takes more than 10 minutes to read… it’s probably too long. Interviews should, ideally, be less than one hour long, and the majority of the time spent should involve the interviewee talking while you listen.

Don’t forget that scripts are a guide, not a bible. If you find something interesting takes place in an interview and there are no questions, on the script, to explore that idea… explore it anyway. Similarly, if an unforeseen topic has arisen that you need to explore, do so before you lose track of its relevance. Feel free to amend the script for future uses.

When scheduling your interviews, leaving 30 minutes or so between each interview is a good idea. That way, you’ll have time to make additional notes and compile your thoughts while everything is still fresh in your mind.

How to Conduct a User Interview

Conducting an interview is simply a question of running through your script or asking the questions you have. However, there are some tips to make this more useful as a process:

• Make your interviewees comfortable – dress in a manner similar to them (your being in a suit while they’ve dressed in tracksuits is going to make it feel like a job interview rather than a user test); make sure they understand you are testing a product or an idea and not them as users (apart from anything else, people tend to act differently if they feel they’re under a microscope); offer them a drink (non-alcoholic), conduct a little small talk (but only a little) before you start, etc.
• Try to keep the interview on time and heading in the right direction – the reason scripts are useful is because you can reference them for this. Remember, though, that while they provide a good framework or conduit, many key points can still come up spontaneously; so, keep an eye on how you ration your time, especially because users tend to get irritated if they’re kept longer than you had agreed.
• Try to focus on the interviewee and not on making notes – it’s just plain rude to bury your head in your notes. Maintain eye contact, keep a conversation flowing, and record the interview instead of getting lost in notetaking. Keep the users engaged in a living process; if they feel they’re giving descriptions to a clerk at a lost property office, they’ll almost certainly switch off.
• Thank the interviewees at the end of the process – not only is this polite, but you can offer a chance for the interviewees to ask any questions of their own at this point, too.

Author/Copyright holder: Victorgrigas. Copyright terms and license: CC BY-SA 3.0

Remember that interviews are a two-way exchange and that, as the ‘host’, the onus is on you to create a pleasant atmosphere that’s conducive to gaining insights.

Reporting on User Interviews

User interviews tend to provide qualitative rather than quantitative data. Compiling the results of many interviews can be challenging. Word clouds (graphical representations of word frequency) and mind maps (hierarchical diagrams that show the relationships between the components) are two good ways of presenting qualitative data in an interesting but easy-to-understand format. Written reports are fine, but try to contain them to the key data and leave all the minor stuff in appendices.

The Take Away

User interviews are a cheap and easy way to get data ‘straight from the horse’s mouth’. However, it’s important to bear in mind that there are limitations to this technique and you may discover what people say they do rather than what they actually do. Contextual interviews are especially useful in exposing accurate user-experience situations. Whichever style you choose, conducting interviews is simple. Write a script, and go through it with the user. However, be prepared to tap unforeseen subjects that arise spontaneously. Remember to abide by the time parameters in which your interviewee has agreed to speak to you. Above all, make sure you keep the user informed and comfortable as you proceed. The insights you gain from doing so can pay huge dividends later.

References & Where to Learn More

Some additional tips on user interviews from the Nielsen Norman Group - https://www.nngroup.com/articles/interviewing-users/

Why listening to users isn’t always the right thing to do also from the Nielsen Norman Group – https://www.nngroup.com/articles/first-rule-of-usability-dont-listen-to-users/

Some ideas for questions in user interviews – https://medium.com/user-research/never-ask-what-they-want-3-better-questions-to-ask-in-user-interviews-aeddd2a2101e - .izil93jqf

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