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User interviews can be a time sink. Here’s 5 tips to be more efficient
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How do you distill the beautiful, chaotic stream of consciousness from a user interview into something useful, actionable and clear?
It’s tough.
Even more so when you’re in a role that isn’t explicitly dedicated to user research and you’re having to wear many hats. My role is growth — I’m spread across product, marketing and analytics; I need to get user research done as fast and efficiently as possible in early stage startups.
When I first started interviewing in 2018, I took ages. I wasted time making sure the transcript was perfect (or forgot to transcribe in the first place), procrastinated with formatting and punctuation, and delayed taking actions from the research.
I’ve done 100s of user interviews totalling over two weeks of constant interviewing, cleaning and analysing. But to be honest, it felt like longer.
Now, I’ve managed to reduce analysis, cleaning and idea-generation down to double the time of the interview. I.e. if I do a 20-minute interview, it takes me 40 mins to analyse it. 30 minutes takes me an hour, and so on.
So, we’ll run through what I’ve learned about how to go from the chaos of an interview to actions in as short an amount of time as possible. All with free tools too.
TL;DR for the busy bees out there: keep interviews on-topic, use tools to transcribe, distil your transcript multiple times (this is the real time saver), keep an ideas board handy, don’t do more than 3–4 in-depth interviews in a day, and lastly, be ruthless with what you include.
Let’s go into each of these in more detail and some common pitfalls to avoid.
1. Keep your user interviews to 20-minutes
This is key. You want to aim for around 5–7 user interviews for discovery research or Jobs to Be Done research. Each one at around 20-minutes. This will avoid 2 big pitfalls:
