How to understand the real needs of users through in-depth user interviews

What should you ask people and why? In this article, I used the principles of identifying users’ Job To Be Done.

Basic points

Never ask “Do you like our idea?” “Would you buy such a product?” etc. In response, you can receive a lie out of respect or to please. The interlocutor may absolutely sincerely praise your idea and really intend to buy the product, but when the time comes, s/he will find a thousand excuses.

This happens because people do not evaluate themselves well in the future.

Think about yourself too. Did you intend to get up early on the weekend, start going to the gym next month, quit eating sweets, etc. and ended up failing the intention?

Ask about the past and present. Not about the future. Facts about something completed are a more reliable harbinger of the future than mere announced intentions.

Sample questions and their reason

Here below is a list of key questions to understand the essence of the process. You can modify them or add something to it specifically for your needs and your product filed. And yep, the questions should be open-ended (those which are answered in detail, not “yes” or “no”).

Let’s say we plan to launch a platform for selling online courses and we want to understand the true needs of people in this context, satisfy them better than competitors and snatch a part of the market.

“Why are you interested in online education?”

This will help you find out the initial motivation of the client, as well as the details of the context in which the person needed your type of product or service.

“How did you choose courses (platforms) in the past?”

You will find out what people paid attention to, what they considered important in this matter and in what ways they sought what they wanted.

“What other options did you consider? Why were they abandoned?”

Comparing the selected option with those that did not fit the interlocutor, we can understand how a person chooses the right product. Very interesting insights happen here, which a person may not tell right away. If this happens, you should definitely dig deeper.

“What were you afraid of at the start of working with the learning platform you chose?”

The fears told by the interlocutor are what you should avoid in your product. Plus, the reason for these fears can reveal a lot about the types of your customers.

If the person is a current user of someone else’s product or your existing product, then it is reasonable to know the following:

“How satisfying is the chosen solution?”

Try to find out how people are ready to put up with existing problems and what is enough for them to satisfy the desired result.

Plus, if the current solution satisfies the interviewees, then try to find out in detail the strengths of this solution. This is something worth pumping in your product / service and doing better than others.

“What similar services are you looking at?”

This is a trick question. If before that people praised some product and said that everything was OK, but now thay say that they were interested in another similar one because … (any reason), then there is part of the dissatisfaction.

As a result, you will find out how likely it is that customers will switch to another product / service and what should be done to keep them.

“If online courses didn’t exist, what educational tools would you use at that time?”

Here you can find indirect competitors. Try to unearth why people would consider the particular option they say. It will help you understand how to deal with such potential competitors.

“What didn’t I ask? Is there any other information I should know?”

Perhaps there are things that you don’t even know at all, but people attach great importance to them.

What’s next

In the next post I’ll tell some tricks how to find respondents for user interviews. Let’s be in touch.