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:

Mistake 1: going off topic

A common mistake I’ve made in the past is trying to cram in too much into one interview. People start with wanting to learn:

1. Pains / problems / push factors: what problem do people have? What language do they use to describe it? What are their emotions?
2. Gains / desired outcome: what are they trying to achieve?
3. Current / competitor solutions: how do they solve their problem now, or in the past? How did that go for them?
4. Barriers and uncertainties: what hesitations went through their mind while trying to solve that problem?

And that should be it. Stop there. Stop.

It’s tempting to try to cram in things like: their views on a specific feature, whether they have bought, what they think of their subscription, pricing questions, whether they have referred…

Especially when other teams know you’re doing research and try to pop a request in, ‘while you’re at it, can you also ask…’.

If you do this, you will not be able to dig any deeper on the core pains and desires. You’ll be spread to thin and find it tough to stick to 20 minutes. Which makes them long to analyse without adding much extra value to the task at hand. It spreads focus.

Remember: sticking to 20-minutes forces you to stay on topic.

If you want to know about a specific feature or pricing, do a separate set of focused user research calls.

Mistake 2: spending time on the wrong people

Another reason to stick to 20-minutes is that you may not be interviewing the right person. Its often transpired throughout an interview that the person doesn’t actually fall into your target audience.

Often, we’re doing these interviews to find the right audience — find the people with the highest pain and discover what makes these people a fit. Therefore going for a deep 40-60-minute interview can be a waste of time if you don’t have your audience nailed.

Alternatively, if you’ve validated the person ahead of time (with a pre-interview questionnaire or via a friend referral) or you’re later in your discovery journey and have high confidence in your target audience, longer interviews can be a valid use of time.

Think you’re in a not-so-ideal interview? Cut it short. Bin your questions and say “that’s it from my side, is there anything you’d like to ask me about?” It feels brutal, but it saves precious time that you could be spending speaking to the users of your dreams.

Not sure if you’re recruiting the right people? Try some screener questions. Calendly has some you can add, and participant recruiting platforms will often have that option too.

2. Record & transcribe. But don’t make it perfect

It’s a basic one, but record your interviews.

Ask beforehand, I normally say:

“To avoid me frantically taking notes, do you mind if I record this? It’ll only be used for internal purposes for me and the rest of the team to improve [product name]”.

My favourite tool is otter.ai. As with Otter, you can have the window open and transcribe while you’re chatting. Which save you importing audio files and waiting for the transcript to process. Otter will also join your calls automatically if you sync your calendar, so no need to faff about.

I have Otter on one side recording, and the call on the other, with another tab for my questions. You can see Otter’s auto record in there with me too. Yes, Nathan let me take this screenshot.

Note: I always do a backup on my phone, i.e. record on voice notes at the same time, in case something happens.

Otter is pretty good at transcribing. But when there’s an accent involved, it can struggle. It has a pretty generous free tier though.

Here’s the trick: when I auto transcribe, I leave it there in Otter. I don’t go and edit it perfectly as that is the biggest time sink of user interview research. If team members want to listen, they can directly in Otter, and if they want an overview, they can read an interview snapshot (more to come).

It’s tempting to correct the grammar, but don’t, it’s a waste of time as realistically a transcript is still a raw format.

3. The secret to quick analysis? Distill, distill, distill

The big mistake I made early on with user interviews was trying to go from an un-edited transcript full of errors straight to the final product. It was overwhelming.

Without distilling, you get stuck in the semantics of sentences rather than the bigger themes and picture on the interview. Taking more steps actually saves time in the long run.

Distillation step 1: quick and dirty

The first step of analysing your 20-minute interview is a scrappy copy paste job. Nothing more. You’re going for speed here, not accuracy.

I type docs.new into my search bar to open a new Google Doc. In there, I paste 6 headers in (don’t bother formatting it, no one will see this):

1. Demographics
2. Pains/push factors
3. Desired outcome
4. Barriers and uncertainties
5. Solution (your product)
6. Solution (competitor)

When I say don’t bother formatting, I mean it. Arial all the way.

Next, I re-listen to the recording in Otter, and paste across relevant lines into the Untitled Doc. To speed up, you can:

• Skip any time you’re asking a question
• Skip any hellos and goodbyes
• Play on 1.25X speed

Be wary of skipping any speech at the end — I find people often divulge the juiciest stuff right at the end as in a passing comment as they say goodbye.

In 15–20 minutes, you’ll have a messy, grammatically incorrect but perfectly themed document of user quotes. Next, let’s tidy it up.

Distillation step 2: create a scalable, user-friendly doc

Now you have coded the interview, it’s time to make it into a format that people can use for:

• Ad copy
• Product marketing
• Ideating new features

& more.

I took this step from the article How to write copy that converts… by stealing copy by my good friend and Growth Consultant, Daphne Tideman.

In her article, Daphne links to her template for a swipe file for copy. Which is one of the most genius templates I’ve ever used.

I like to call this doc the Copy Doc, or Copy Bible. Essentially, its a searchable, filterable store of copy straight from the user’s mouth, categorised by customer desire map sections.

An example, using the copy doc as the product. Inception vibes going on here.

In the past, I’ve used Miro or Figjam and a load of post-its at this stage in the analysis, which is great for visualising, but it’s not very scalable — it’s a mess when you keep adding. Its a visual onslaught.

Whereas this is super scalable: you can use it for months, even years. You can search for specific keywords, you can filter for just problems. You can add sources not just from user research, but also from app reviews, competitor reviews, Trustpilot reviews. You name it, you can add it. And multiple stakeholders can use it.

Daphne’s template also has another tab for a filled-in customer desire map so you can see what ‘good’ looks like. Check it out (here).

So, I copy and paste from my quick-n-dirty doc into the copy doc. This is where you can edit the sentences so they make grammatical sense.

What saves time here is that you’re not editing sentences that don’t provide value — you left those in the transcript. You’ve already selected out the important parts by default.

Another is that you’ve already read it through at least once, so you have an overarching view of the themes of the interview before getting into the weeds.

Side note: keep an ideas board open

This is something Product Designer Sära Furlong taught me. When you go through any research process, have an area where you can dump ideas and actions. Ideas pop up in your mind, and if you don’t capture them you may forget.

It’s a great way to make sure that you’re creating actionable ideas out of your research ASAP (and not just procrastinating or overthinking, as I used to)

Distillation step 3: create a visual interview snapshot

Last but not least, make something memorable & shareable.

This idea is from Continuous Discovery Habits by Teresa Torres — my all-time favourite product discovery book — and its called the interview snapshot.

Here’s what my version looks like (the love child of a Figma template and an image from Teresa’s book):

Ideally you get a real user pic from the call, but a cartoon will do. The aim is to glance at the snapshot and jog your memory about who you chatted to.

I’ve been searching for an all-in-one user interview summary for a while. I used to write bullet points in Slack or Notion, but found that people didn’t read them and they all blurred into one after a while.

What’s great about this template is it includes bits of everything: a user persona, Jobs to be Done, a customer empathy canvas, and a space for actions/opportunities.

I’d recommend doing this right after the copy doc. Everything is fresh in your mind, and if your interview was 20 minutes, the snapshot should take you 10.

A lot of people spend ages presenting user research insights. Presentation after presentation, chart after flow diagram after who-knows-what. The great thing about these snapshots is you can paste them right into a deck, or into Slack.

It has everything stakeholders needs in a way that makes it easy for them to take what they need without the need to set up a meeting and walk them through it. Because let’s face it, those meetings end up with you speaking and the other person ignoring while they read your slides…

Feel free to use my template, and mix it up if you’d like to add more/less.

4. Don’t do more than 3 → 4 in one day

To be efficient at user interviews, you can’t do too many at once. They’re intense, sometimes you go places that are tough and you need time to rebalance.

I’d recommend not doing more than 3 in a day, max 4 if they’re 20 minutes long.

Realistically, the more you do the more fried your brain gets, and the less efficient you become.

So be kind to your mind, and take a break. Spread the analysis over a week, and don’t go overboard interviewing more than you need (7 will do).

5. Be ruthless and cut the ones that don’t matter

My last learning is to cut. If someone wasn’t the right audience? Don’t bother analysing it. If they went off on a tangent about their dog, skip that part all together. You can save previous minutes and previous words by being ruthless with what you choose to analyse.

The process in a nutshell

Ta da — an hour later and you’ve got 2 amazing resources to share.

Not only can you avoid sinking time, but you can focus on what matters in user interviews. Create formats that are scalable, user friendly and shareable, and ultimately get more out of your research.

To summarise how to make sure you’re not sinking time into user interviews:

1. Keep them to 20 minutes
2. Record and transcribe your interviews
3. Distill the transcript 3 times
4. Don’t overload yourself: analyse 3 a day
5. Be ruthless and cut out what’s low value

A final note: I’m still learning (I received feedback today that I’m dead pan in user interviews, so working on that….). If you have any suggestions for best practice, ways to improve — send them my way in the comments 💫