Seven Mistakes to Avoid During User Interviews

Everyone has been in or conducted a not-so-great interview, wishing we had some golden rule book to have helped us through the process. As UX Practitioners and as basic human beings, we learn by doing and by example. Without the mistakes, how will we grow? Without the guidance, how will we know what we can achieve? UX Designer Frankie Kastenbaum and I teamed up to make this golden rule book (or maybe more of a golden list of guidelines, but that name isn’t as fun), and we did so in a UX-meets-Social Media manner. We observed how our peers, teammates, and even students were conducting interviews, while also researching the feedback from our instructors, mentors, and teammates on our interviews: from yesteryear to yesterday. From all of this, we want to present to you The 7 Mistakes to Avoid During User Interviews.

1. Asking more than one question at a time

Humans only remember a few things at a time, and broken up at that. Our phone numbers are broken-up groupings of 3–4 numbers for the sole reason that we’ll remember them. In a user interview, if you ask a string of questions at once, not only does it give away your follow-up answers before you ask them, but there is a high chance that the interviewee will not remember what they are being asked. With so many parts, or with so much time passed, just asking the questions in that way may lead the user to be more concerned with hitting all parts of the question than they are with the thoughtfulness of their answer.

Instead, ask the topic-setting question first — like, “Have you gone to a coffee shop in the past week?” And then asking, “What did you order?” and “How did you place your order?” consecutively afterwards, instead of asking something like, “Have you gone to a coffee shop in the past week? Did you stay there or take it to go? What did you get and how did you order it?” Think about how you would feel being asked all of those questions at once — would you remember all of that?

With that said…

2. Hammering questions at an interviewee

You want this interview to be a comfortable and safe environment, as if it were a conversation. With conversations come stories, and people tend to explain things better through…