Conducting User Interviews to validate a problem: Best Practices

Conducting user interviews to validate a problem is a task that requires careful planning & execution. A useful format you can use is a 45-minute interview conducted with two interviewers where one person asks questions and the other takes notes and pitches in with questions if needed. This way, you do not miss out on insights as you write down all responses real-time, and there is double the brain power to think creatively on how to delve deeper into the participant’s responses. It is important to keep the following in mind while conducting a user interview:

1. Selecting the right participants

It is important to be extremely specific when you define your target audience. It is worth spending some time thinking about it to make sure you are targeting the right audience. You wouldn’t know if the target audience is the right one to solve for until you interview them, but you can effectively narrow down the target audience upfront by making your best guess in evaluating whether each individual in your defined audience likely has:

-a similar pain point

-similar desires or needs

-similar challenges

-similar responsibilities

-similar resources

2. Making the participant comfortable

It is important that the participant does not feel tested by you. So, it is best to set the context and explain to him why you are asking him questions at the beginning of the interview & mention that there are no right or wrong answers. Also, if questions could be potentially sensitive, it is important to reword them such that they are not uncomfortable/offensive to the participant in any way. It is important to plan these questions before the interview so that they are delivered in the right way and get the intended answers.

3. Keeping it flexible

It is important to have a list of questions ready that you ideally want to cover through the interview. However it often happens that you uncover significant insights not as a direct response to one of our questions but as something the participant mentions when questioned ‘Why’ repeatedly (at least 3 or 4 times) in an attempt to go to the depths of any one answer. So rather than rushing to go through your complete list of questions within the time limit of the interview, it might be a better strategy to spend more time on questions that the participant appears to have insightful answers for, and dig deeper into those answers. It is important for the interviewer to think on their feet in deciding which questions to spend more time on and making a good judgement on which questions to deprioritize.

4. Keeping questions open-ended

As much as you want your hypothesis about the problem to be validated, you should not get tempted to ask the participant directly about the specific problem, at least in the beginning. You should try to ask open ended questions and see what direction the conversation takes & whether the participant mentions the problem himself. If he does, it is a good indication that it is an actual problem, and not something the participant is just going along with, because you asked about it. The more open-ended your questions are, the more you will get an idea about how the participant thinks and what his pain areas really are. If he does not mention the problem that you are looking to hear about himself, in that case you can ask about it. However, one must be careful not to display one’s eagerness & passion for the problem to the participant, for that may make the participant obliged to give answers which are not true.

5. Focusing on the problem & not the solution

For a user interview intended to validate a problem, it does not make sense to ask detailed questions focusing on a solution that you may have conceived. Because, what we conceived as the solution may very well change once we really discover and get a fair understanding of the problem. So those questions may be important at a later stage but not in an interview where the primary objective is to discover the problem. It takes a lot of time to get real insights about the problem, so you want to use that precious time that you have with the participant to focus more on the problem. It is critical to do that.