As designers, we often have to or hopefully want to talk to customers or potential customers to understand their needs and make better design decisions. Interviewing people can be challenging and stressful for designers used to work with researchers who make this process so much easier. Interviewing users requires preparation, planning, patience and focus on making the best of each interview participant and providing real value for you, them and the business paying for it.
This guide is all you need if you are a beginner with user interviews or need a refresher.

Preparation

Research context

Before diving into interviews, understanding why we are doing the research is paramount. What is the project background? What problem or area of the product are we trying to understand? How does all this align with our product vision? Are there any unknown intricacies we need to be aware of?

Research objectives

Having some key objectives in mind can help us stay focused and create a better action plan. What would we like to learn? What are the main questions we would like answered? For example: Can users understand our message? Do users interact with this feature? How easy is it for people to do this task?

Success criteria

What will make this research successful? Whether uncovering pain points, validating assumptions, or uncovering opportunities, having a clear vision will help us deeply understand why we are doing this, what we need to focus on during the interview and where we should guide the conversation if it diverts.

Recruitment

Recruit criteria

The next step is to define the right participants for our research. Are we interested in a specific user persona or customer segment, or do we like to learn from more diverse users? A diverse participant pool enriches insights, but focusing on a specific user type can produce more detailed insights. Here, we can consider different demographics, product experience or proficiency and tech savviness levels. For example, we might want to reach out to existing users who have been unsuccessful with your product or new users experiencing it for the first time.

Participant questionnaire

To recruit participants, we need to create a questionnaire to help us find the best fit for our research. Multiple-choice questions are usually the best approach. We can disguise our objective by including questions with both acceptable and unacceptable answers to avoid suspicion.

Asking yes or no questions is not recommended because they can be suggestive and lead to biased responses. For example: Are you using Facebook? Yes or No. A better question would be, “Are you using any of these social media platforms? Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn or None?”.

Including open-ended questions is a good practice. The participant’s answers can reveal how serious or truthful they are while adding more colour to their use case.

Shortlisting participants

If this is done correctly, we should have a good pool of participants that satisfy our criteria to select from and invite for an interview.

We can invite 5–10 people to participate in the interviews based on our available time and budget. However, if we come across more suitable candidates, we can shortlist them and use them as backups in case some of the initial invitees do not show up or if we require additional insights towards the end. For instance, we might find a new topic arising from the interviews or that a particular type of participant, who might not be represented enough, has a new and different perspective. In this case, we can keep interviewing similar participants to obtain a complete picture.

Planning

Semi-structured interview guide

To ensure we are touching on all the right areas and answering all our questions, we should put together a rough script to use as a guide. It will help us if we are stuck and alleviate stress, allowing us to direct the conversation more effectively and bring it back if it goes off-topic.

Our guide should include clearly defined steps and questions without this preventing us from improvising and diving deeper into things that might come up and sound compelling. It can cover conversation points, themes to explore, questions we want to be answered, or activities and interactions we wish to observe in an order that makes sense. For example, we might want to chat about the interviewee’s habits or use case and then have them interact with the product or look at a competitor. Having bullet points of questions for each step/section of the interview will keep us on track. But, it is okay if the order changes a bit during the natural flow of the interview, as participants are different, so we should listen and adapt.

Interview guidelines

Open & Curious

As interviewers, we should come to the interview open and curious, ready to listen and learn while leaving our preconceptions behind. We should question our assumptions and ensure we are not exposing them during the interview with leading questions. Our questions should not carry emotions or opinions. The goal is to understand what matters to our interviewee and not what we think should matter.

Respectful & Sensitive

We should respect our interviewee’s expertise and create a comfortable, friendly environment where they don’t feel judged about what they are sharing. To ensure we get the most out of people we need to be sensitive and connect with them on a human level. Our posture and tone of voice should be warm, gentle and approachable yet contained and professional. Also, being polite and considerate, even humorous at times, can help us build rapport and put people at ease.

Understanding & Critical

We should be attentive listeners, capable of empathising, interpreting, and comprehending what’s communicated. It is good to take notes during the conversation to refer back to them later or avoid re-asking the same questions. In addition, we should be critical listeners, not by agreeing or disagreeing with the speaker, but rather by detecting inconsistencies and ambiguities in their statements to challenge what’s being said and arrive at the truth.

Interview Introduction

Welcome

It’s crucial to welcome the participants and express gratitude for their presence warmly, then proceed with introductions. While introducing ourselves, we should refrain from revealing our complete role and involvement in the project. If people think we have personal involvement, they might be prompt to cater to our preferences or try to please us.

Break the Ice

Our demeanour should be friendly and approachable. A good icebreaker is asking if they’ve done a research interview before. Then, we can set the scene and manage their expectations of what’s coming.

Inform

We need to go through the structure of the interview with them. Make sure they have a good understanding of what’s coming and what we’re asking of them. If there are any special requirements and expectations for the interview, for example, using their phone or sharing their screen, we should let them know early.

Direct

We should highlight that we want them to be honest; nothing can hurt our feelings. We want them to share aloud what they see and interact with along with their thoughts and feelings; there aren’t wrong answers. We could also emphasise that they are free to explore as they’d normally do if we weren’t watching them.

Connect

To show care and create rapport, we should ensure people understand the premise and are okay with it. We can ask, “Is this all okay with you?” or “Before we start, do you have any questions for us?”. We can also let them know that if any questions come up during the interview, we can answer them at the end.

Finally, if we want to record the interview instead of just taking notes, getting the participants’ permission beforehand is sensible and ethical. They might expect this as part of the interview, but it’s still good to prepare them and demonstrate consideration and respect for their feelings before we start recording.

Questioning Tips & Examples

General tips

The bulk of the interview relies on our ahead-of-time planning to cover all the topics in a rational and sensible order while making it flow like a natural conversation, being present, listening and adjusting when needed.

We should use simple, understandable language and avoid technical terms so users can easily engage with our questions.

We should also embrace pauses and silences to allow participants to complete their thoughts.

Open-ended questions

Ideally, we start with a generic open-ended question and allow the rest of the interview to flow naturally. We carefully listen to the participant and consult our guide to ask follow-up questions that drive the conversation in our desired direction. Examples of starting questions:

• Tell me a little bit about yourself and how you … “
• When did you first…?
• What does … mean for you?
• How would you normally…?
• When do you usually..?
• Tell me a little bit about the last time you…?

Learn more questions

If we want participants to elaborate more on a specific subject, repeating their statement back at them and asking for confirmation helps them feel listened to while prompting them to open up and share more. For example:

• What I hear is _ tell me more about that?
• So, I understand _ is that right?
• It seems like _ is this correct?
• It looks like …
• I see you _, why is that?

At times, a simple “mmm” might also do the job.

Go deep questions

Introducing a child’s curiosity can help us ask deeper questions such as:

• Why do you think that?
• Why do you think that is?
• Why is this important for you?
• Why is this for you or not for you?
• Can you explain in more detail…?

Get specific questions

When people make vague statements like “It’s easy”, “It’s confusing”, or “It’s cool”, we can gain a better understanding by asking:

• What makes it…?
• What about this you find…?
• What about this is …?
• What makes you feel that?
• Can you give me an example of that?

General participant questions

During the interview, participant questions might arise. But, we should go against our instincts and avoid answering them. We can continue the conversation with more questions, like:

• What do you think?
• Where would you look for an answer?
• How would you find out?
• Why is this important for you?
• What would that change for you?
• How would you use that?
• Why would you need that?

Interaction questions

People might also miss things in the UI or need help finding something. We shouldn’t help them directly but provide hints to help them explore further and push the conversation forward. Like:

• Is there anything here that might be what you’re looking for?
• Where would you look for that?
• Where do you think you would find that?
• Where would you expect it to be?
• Would this have a different name?

Guiding questions

If participants can’t find the feature, we can provide additional guidance by highlighting the specific area they should review.

• Would you ever think of trying…
• Have you looked at…
• What if I told you, you can…
• Did you notice…

Direct questions

As the interview ends, there may be missed opportunities to discuss certain topics or follow up on specific points. After allowing participants to share their perspectives, we can proceed to ask more direct and specific questions, such as:

• Have you ever used a …?
• Do you have experience with …?
• Do you usually do this …?
• Would you look for something like that …?
• How would you do this… if…?

Debriefing questions

Lastly, if we want to measure people’s understanding of the product and its perceived value or learn what is most important for them and their overall impressions, we can ask questions like:

• Who do you think this tool is for?
• What do you think this product can do for you?
• Would you use this product/feature?
• How would you use this product/feature?
• Would you recommend this product? To whom?
• What do you think so far?

Closing up

Closing up, we need to ensure that people said everything they wanted to say and that we gave them the chance to articulate anything they might thought important. For example, we can ask them:

• Is there anything else you would like to add?
• Is there anything we missed or haven’t talked about today?
• Is there anything you would like to share but didn’t have the chance to do yet?
• Any last thoughts or questions for us?

We can also get back to any questions that might have come up during or after the interview and provide more context around specific interactions or features for participants who might be interested.

Lastly, a good practice is to thank them for their help and highlight how valuable their input and insights are.

Conclusion

Interviewing users can be overwhelming and stressful at times. Being prepared, knowing what you’d to learn and why, recruiting the right participants and having a clear plan will help you focus, stay on track and make the most out of the interview sessions. Approach any interview with a curious, open, respectful, understanding but critical attitude. Listening is key, and building rapport can help you go deeper and gather higher-quality insights. Remember it’s not about you or the design, it’s about people, so try to keep your perspectives at home and seek criticism, not praise.