Preparing for User Interviews
The quality of an interview is mostly settled before it starts. This lesson covers writing questions that open a conversation instead of closing it, and the preparation that lets you put the script down when something more interesting comes up.
After this lesson you can
- Write questions that ask for a specific past event rather than for an opinion.
- Build a guide short enough that you can put it down.
- Decide in advance the three things you would keep if there were only room for three.
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Module Overview
This kind of interviewing is not market research. It goes deeper with fewer people, and it is after why somebody does what they do rather than what they do, because motivation is what you can design against.
Start from research objectives rather than questions. Write down what you are trying to learn, then turn each of those into something you can actually ask about an experience. Questions anchored to the best, the worst, the last or the first draw out specific stories, because a person can remember a particular day in a way they cannot remember their average one.
Shape the conversation as a funnel: open broad, narrow into your topic, then widen out again at the end to thank them and say what happens to what they told you. Keep the guide as a checklist rather than a script. Avoid closed questions that can be answered yes or no, and avoid leading ones, which is the trap in a question like “why do you think this is a good idea?”
Where this usually goes wrong
- Writing twenty questions, and then feeling obliged to ask all twenty.
- Leading with the question you most want answered, before any trust exists.
- Describing your concept first, which turns the rest of the hour into feedback on your idea.
Check it landed
3 questions, and one of them has no right answer. You get the reasoning either way.
Which of these opens a conversation rather than closing it?
What is the interview guide actually for?
How many questions belong in a guide for a forty-five minute interview?
Sign in to answer these and see the reasoning behind each one.
Put it to work
One template goes with this lesson. Each one has its own guide on when and how to use it.
