User Interviews are a vital part of the design process as they provide insights into the needs, behaviors, and motivations of the product users. They are typically performed with potential users of a design during the ideation or early concept development phase.

User interviews follow a structured methodology where the interviewer prepares a list of topics to cover, records what is said during the interview, and systematically analyzes the conversation afterward. The topics can range from users’ feelings, motivations, daily routines, to how they use various products.

User interviews can be conducted in various ways, including over a video or voice call if time is restricted. In projects with sufficient time and resources, an interview may be conducted in the user’s home, and designers might even be flown overseas if the users reside in another country.

There are different types of user interviews, including contextual interviews that take place in the participants’ everyday environment. These provide more insights relating to the environment in which a design will be used. On the other hand, semi-structured interviews are somewhat structured in that you prepare a set of topics you would like to cover during the interview, but still open enough that you can follow leads in the conversation and change the order of topics.

To conduct user interviews effectively:

1. Set a Goal for Your Interviews: Form a concise, concrete goal for your user interviews—one that’s related to a specific aspect of your users’ behaviors or motivations is ideal.

2. Prepare Questions: Write a set of interview questions that can help you achieve your goal. The questions may be pre-determined or free-form.

3. Conduct the Interview: Build a rapport with your participants, explain the purpose of the interview, ask open-ended questions, and make sure your body language keeps interviewees at ease throughout.

4. Analyze the Data: Use thematic analysis to analyze your interview data and discover the key insights.

However, there are also some drawbacks to user interviews. There’s a difference between what humans say and what they actually do. Human memory is flawed and we can often struggle to recall details as clearly as we would like. Participants often leave out small details because they deem them insignificant.

In conclusion, user interviews are a crucial part of the product design process, as they allow designers to gain insight into the users’ needs, behaviors, and motivations. They provide a great opportunity to meet your users, understand and start to design for them. However, it's important to also complement interviews with observation-based research to attain an accurate and thorough sense of what users really do.

User Interview Process:

1. Open discovery questions

To keep the conversation going you want to ask open questions. Those questions are questions that require more than a single word answer (like yes/no). Avoid starting questions by “did you” / “have you” / “were you” and replace them by “why”, “how”, etc.

• “Tell me about …”

• “Why do you …”?

• “What is / are …?”

• “What … do you use / do ?”

• “Describe to me how you… / your experience with…?”

• “How often do you…?” (to ask about frequency and quantity)

• “How much/many…” (can also be used to probe level of knowledge like “how much do you know about this topic?”)

2. Understanding user tasks / activities

Here are a few starter questions that help me understand how people perform tasks and activities. Most of the time we work on digital product, but those can apply to any type of task or activity.

• “How do you [task]…?” (direct)

• “Describe how you would [task]?” (indirect)

• “What are all the things you need to do and know in order to [task]?”

• Sequence: “Walk me through the steps, how do you [task]?”

• Comparison: “What is the difference between [task 1] and [other task]?”

3. Performing / showing

User interviews don’t have to be limited to questions you can also ask people to perform tasks.

• “Show me how you [task]“ ask them to perform the task, share their screen, etc.

• Role playing: “Let’s pretend I’m a colleague who knows nothing about [task]. Guide me so that I could do it myself afterwards” (a friend of mine likes to use “explain to me like I’m a five years old”, I like the idea but it might not be good in some situations ^^)

4. Talking about problems and pain points

Part of my job is to understand issues and pain points in order to try to solve them. Here are some questions that help.

• “How does this problem impact you?”

• ” How did you solve / get around that issue?”

• “What’s the hardest / most frustrating part about …?”

• “If you had a magic wand, what would you change?”

5. Opinions / points of view / attitude and projections

Those questions usually help me ask about opinions. Still you need to bear in mind that opinion questions are highly susceptible to some biases. For example: like courtesy bias is “the tendency to give an opinion that is more socially correct than one’s true opinion, so as to avoid offending anyone”.

• “What do you think about …?”

• “What do you like/dislike about…?”

• “What would your friend/partner/colleague think of that?

• “Some people …, other …, what is your opinion on that?”

• Variant: “Last week I interviewed people who did // said … What do you think of that idea // how do you feel about this approach?

6. Recalling the past / anticipating the future

You can ask people about events in the past. Be careful though: any event prior to a few days in the past might be distorted. Also note that people have a hard time projecting in the future so, again, treat the replies to those kinds of questions accordingly.

• “Please recall a situation when you …, what did you do?”

• “Tell me about your most significant/ memorable experience/interaction with…?”

• “How do you think … is going to help you?”

• “Describe to me the ideal product / experience…?”

7. Sentence completion and drawing

Last but not least, sometimes ask people to complete a sentence. Also ask them to draw something like a process, how they recall the interface, etc. Some people are more visual thinkers than others so it can really help. How many times did you end up in a conversation where someone just said “wait let me show you” and started drawing a chart to explain to you?