How to interview your users?
Extensive and tedious meetings, full of faced opinions in which no conclusion is reached. Unsuccessful debates that make you and your team lose time, energy and that generate inefficiencies in your project or business . . . You have thought that maybe the decision does not have to take it? Why don't you rely on your users to make decisions?
Reflect a little . . . when was the last time you talked to your customers to make decisions in your company? If the answer is never or even remember when it was the last time you did it I invite you to feel and dedicate five minutes to read this post in which I will show you how, and why, talking to your users can be aof the cheapest and most effective forms for your project to take the right direction and so that all these fruitless meetings and headaches are reduced.
Also if you read until the end I will give you some tricks to make this process something much more dynamic, fun and integrated in your day to day.
Why should you interview your users?
We all know the saying that says "the client is always right" and, although there are clients whose attitudes may like more or less . . . it is true that they are always right.
Your users are the ones who give meaning to your business, they are the ones that support it and make you can pay the expenses and payrolls of your company. If you are the CEO of your company largely it is because your users buy your product. If you are a member of the organization of the company for which you work, customers are the ones who, at the end of the day, pay your salary.
Therefore, your opinion as a boss can be very relevant, what the expert says within the team is something worthy of being valued but . . . the market sends and, if what you do is not in line with what your users want does notThey will buy and there will be no money to support the business.
Guide of how to interview your users
It doesn't matter if you are in an initial phase of the entrepreneurship of a new business, you may simply want to improve your service or that you are thinking about innovating a project. Once we understand why our users are of vital importance, simple guides can be applied that help you extract relevant results from that research with users.
1. Define the objectives of the investigation
Before starting, be clear what information you want to get. Are you looking to understand how they use your product? Do you want to know your problems and needs? Do you want to know if that innovation you propose provides value?
Having clarity about the objectives of the research will be much easier to know what kind of questions you would have to launch to your users. For example, it would not make much sense that, if what that meeting of hours in which you ended up pulling your hair was for how they were going to use the product, you asked your user what how much they would pay for it. The example may seem very dumb, but you do not know how many times not being clear about the objective of the research leads to the end addressing with countless questions that confuse users during the interview, which implies that the results of said researchDo not give you clarity.
2. Raise your research hypothesis
It is good that you spend time formulating hypotheses based on the objective you have defined. Having hypothesis will help you to evaluate the results of the investigation in a more objective way since who will validate or invalidate your opinions will not be yourself or the collaborators of your team if not the market and your potential customers.
Formulating hypothesis is not a simple task, so, if it can be useful to review this post in which I teach you how to generate those hypotheses in a correct way.
3. Prepare interview questions
Once you have clarity about the objectives of the investigation and you have your hypotheses raised you should spend time think of the type of questions that will help you extract the information you need from your users.
Just as formulating the hypotheses, creating the questions of an investigation is a process that can be done as complex or as simple as you want. There is a lot of training and brave techniques to generate these questions but, in my experience, the best technique is to apply common sense.
Each project and each situation is a world and has to be analyzed separately from the rest. Writing in this post a set of questions that work in all interviews would be to deceive you. This does not work that way, what I suggest is that you feel, analyze the objective, the hypotheses and be able to associate three or four questions to each hypothesis that help you extract the information that validates or invalidates each of the hypotheses andThey give you information for the objective you defined.
4. Open questions vs. Direct questions
As I told you, each project is a world and, each phase of a project . . . too. They are not the same type as you ask those you need when you want to innovate and create something new than when you want to test a concrete idea or when you want to detect improvements in your product or service.
In general terms, open questions will allow your users to develop their own ideas and conclusions based on a question that is not completely defined. These types of questions help you extract information that is, so to speak, recorded in people's subconscious and that, without that indefinition and space to develop their answers it would be impossible to extract that information.
Direct questions are much easier to solve for users, they are much easier to analyze to be applied in your business but, on the other hand, give much less information.
Let's look at an example. Imagine that you have a traditional travel agency and want to know why your agency is not working.
In the case where your goal is to evaluate the value of your agency to the market, would you suggest you ask open questions about the type, how is your whole approach when you decide to travel? The question, if you analyze it has fair ambiguity so that the user of a lot of information, from how and when he decides to take a trip to how he organizes it. In all that information you can detect areas where you could grow your business and that you are not addressing.
However, if what you want is to get more concrete information you could ask direct questions of the type, what would you improve from our agency? How you will see, in such a question the information you are going to give you is much more aimed at much more concrete aspects.
5. Organize your interviews but be flexible
Interviews can be structured through a script. The questions can be very well defined but, deep down, the best thing you can do is be flexible and adapt the interview, always depending on the objectives and hypotheses you want to validate, to the rhythm that the user marks you.
In the interview process you will arise answers and situations that you would not have contemplated and that perhaps give you relevant information for your project so, it is important that, even having your interview script, you knowthe ability to guide you more for the objective and hypothesis than by a super structured script.
Recommendation when interviewing your users
Taking into consideration the opinion of your users or potential clients is essential for your project to work. There are expert profiles such as User Research that can help you a lot in this process of extracting what are called user insights (all -life customer needs).
In my experience of many years in product design and innovation I have learned that the best interview is not the one that is scheduled in the calendar if not the one that arises spontaneously. You have to encourage yourself and in your team a client -centered culture and, if possible, with the greatest possible awareness and clarity about the problems they want to address. Give this to fire, any occasion will be good to ask someone about the product, service or idea that you are thinking or that is generating headaches.
There have been few occasions when being in a party pub in an informal conversation with someone I have managed to solve or clarify some idea. That conversation that arises from chance has been, on more than one occasion, an undercover interview that has helped clarify my mind and has channeled the path of the project in which I was working.
Do not believe that these are techniques that large companies can be allowed. In fact, large companies have to dedicate budgets to get this customer information. You may have a street business with direct contact with your client, think about all the information and the value that you can provide to apply this dynamic in your day to day.
Therefore, internalize this information and take advantage of any occasion that is presented to you to be able to have the feedback of your client and improve your business. I always say that "dedicating myself to innovation I have never invented anything, I have only done what people asked me in a way that they had not raised" but, for that, you have to be prepared and with very open ears.
