How to run a user interview — for dummies (start-up founders)

Tips on how to run user interviews and achieve product-market fit by gaining valuable insights into customer needs

Welcome, dear dummies! This article is a simplified guide on the basics of conducting user research interviews that any start-up founder without a background in design and research should know. This 80–20 approach ensures that by doing these things well, you can obtain 80% of the insights with just 20% of the knowledge required to run user interviews. The reason for this guide is that most early founders cannot afford to hire an experienced researcher or designer, and even if they could, it is not a replacement for talking to customers. No entrepreneur should outsource the task of understanding their customers to someone else.

The Importance of User Interviews

User interviews are the most valuable tool for gaining insights into customer needs, wants, and behaviors. By conducting user interviews, we can gain a deep understanding of our target audience, their motivations, and pain points. This knowledge is essential for developing products that meet the needs of our customers and achieving product-market fit.

My recommendation is to focus on user interviews as the main research method. Follow the famous Y Combinator advice to “talk to your users”. That’s the secret sauce to reaching product market fit. No other research method can get you there. There’s no way around it — no hack, no shortcut.

A key concept — Generative and Summative User Research

Before diving into how to run a user interview, let’s quickly clarify the distinction between user interviews and user testing.

There are two types of user research: generative and summative.

• Generative research, as the name implies, generates new ideas by identifying user pain points. This is done by gaining a deep understanding of their frame of mind, the actions they perform, and the results they expect.
  This type of research is particularly useful for early-stage start-ups because it helps you avoid being locked onto the wrong target. The minute you put a solution in front of the user, the feedback becomes much more granular and specific to what they are seeing. This is not useful in the early stages of developing a product.
• Summative research aims to evaluate whether or not a solution solves the problem it’s meant to solve. This is when you put a prototype in front of your customers and ask them to perform certain tasks.
  With this type of research, you don’t care so much about what they say but what they do. Such research becomes more precise compared to user interviews because you look at metrics like “time on task” and “success rate” and care less about what users say. The only words that matter in user testing sessions are what customers say when they’re asked to think out loud as they perform tasks.

Both types of research need to be approached differently. I don’t recommend doing both with the same person, even if it might sound like a good idea because it can be exhausting for the interviewee. A good user interview lasts about 45 min. If you add another 30–45 min session for summative research, it will be hard for the user to focus, go deep, and give valuable feedback.

Tips for Running User Interviews

Running a user interview can be intimidating, especially if you don’t have experience. Here are some tips to help you run a successful user interview:

1) The main one — Try to talk as little as possible

One of the most common mistakes I see is interviewers talking too much. They get nervous and try to make a good impression, especially if they’re talking to potential important clients. Learn to be comfortable with silence. Learn how to ask people to expand on their thoughts. Sometimes a couple of seconds of silence is enough to make the interviewee want to fill the void and continue explaining their thoughts. In all other cases, simple questions like “Tell me more about…” or “You mentioned X. What do you mean by that? Tell me more about it.” are all that's needed to go deeper. Remember to make the questions short and clear.

Pro tip:

Don’t talk about what other users have said or did! It doesn’t matter. You don’t want to influence the users by putting a sort of indirect peer pressure on them to say something that aligns with what others have said.

2) Don’t let the interviewee take over the conversation

Sometimes interviewees tend to take over the conversation by flipping the tables and asking you a bunch of questions about your product or service. Some even start brainstorming ideas on how to improve your solution. While it’s important to let users speak openly and avoid interrupting them, you also need to keep the discussion focused on the information you need to extract from them, i.e. insights on the problem you’re trying to fix.

Also, remember that this is not a sales meeting. Although the interviewee might also be a potential customer who wants to know more about the solution, keep the topics separate. Do your research session first and discuss sales or customer support next.

3) Record meetings and have a notetaker if possible

Don’t take notes while talking to the interviewee. If you can’t get someone to help, simply record the discussion and go back to extract notes and insights later. Recording interviews is also great for sharing them with the team to convince them of the veracity and severity of the issues you discovered.

4) Don’t ask leading or directed questions

Leading questions are designed to elicit a specific response. If you are asking those kinds of leading questions, you aren’t ready for user interviewing or you are not open to honest feedback. But a lot of other leading questions are because people almost get nervous about asking stark, non-leading, open-ended questions. Instead of just asking the question, people will ask the question and then suggest a possible answer or two. This contaminates the user’s answer because you primed them to think about something they might not otherwise have.

5) Don’t ask people what they want

Users are notoriously bad at accurately describing what they want. They don’t know. They’re not designers or engineers. They’re not experts in the solutions. They are experts in their problem, so ask them to talk about that. Sure, they’ll probably suggest potential solutions as they talk about their problem but don’t take solutions at face value. Instead, focus on trying to find out the root cause of a problem and what they are trying to achieve. Your questions should not be, “What would you like us to do?” Rather they should be, “What are you trying to do?”.

6) Ask open-ended questions

Open-ended questions are key to finding out what people are trying to do and what their problems are. Avoid yes/no questions, which yield little information. You want to ask open-ended questions because they yield expansive responses. Also, avoid vague words. Vague words are open to interpretation, which might lead you to be misled by someone’s response. For example, asking a user “Is this a useful feature?” could give you bad data. Instead, ask something like “Is this feature valuable to the work you do right now?”

7) Don’t make assumptions. Ask the dumb questions.

You can miss a lot of key information if you don’t ask basic questions. This often happens because you assume you already know the answer. Also, basic questions are a great way to ease a person into an interview. For instance, I start user interviews with a question like, “What does your company do? What’s your role in the company?” If you screened your users well, you probably know the answers to these questions, but asking them will reveal additional, interesting details and nuances. This may come in handy for follow-up questions or when I’m putting together the user scenario. It’s also an easy question for anyone to answer, so they’re a great warm-up, helping to make them more comfortable at the start of the interview.

8) Ask people to show rather than tell

People are bad at accurately identifying and describing what they actually want. Whenever possible, ask the interviewee to actually show you how they do something rather than describing their actions. You’ll notice a lot more nuance than you’d otherwise get from them talking about the action.

Continuously Run Both Summative and Generative User Research

A final word of advice: keep an open mind to the fact you might’ve missed something important even after finding some amount of product-market fit or getting positive feedback from your users. Keep running both summative and generative user research continuously, so you can identify new growth opportunities you might not otherwise see.

Further Reading

If you want to dive deeper into the topic, I recommend this video of Emmet Shear, CEO of Twitch 👇

Want to work with me? Visit contrast.studio.