How to conduct user interviews

There’s a multibillion-dollar market research industry loaded with for-fee tools, services, and consultancies. But if you’re on a startup budget, don’t worry. There are lots of ways to recruit users for interviews – for little or no cost. Here are a few examples:

• People who are conference speakers and panelists are often very interested in connecting with others in the industry (and they often like to talk!). So why not reach out with a nice, personalized email and see if they’ll talk to you?
• Press releases from companies in your space (including competitors) can also be a place to source names of people who might be open to becoming research subjects. If your competitor quotes a VP of Engineering in a press release, and you hypothesize that a VP of Engineering is a potential buyer of your product, this person could be a great interview subject.
• Reaching out (appropriately) via social media is always a solid option.
• You can set up a dedicated page on your site for potential participants to opt in and sign up, just like our Research at DigitalOcean page.

If your audience is very broad – maybe your product is a social media app or a photo sharing service – and you have a modest research budget available, then tools like UserTesting.com or Lookback.io are easy ways to find participants. Ethn.io is another useful tool for targeting actual site visitors.

If you’re targeting a hard-to-reach user base – or you’re looking to rapidly ramp up the volume of user interviews you’re doing – recruitment services like respondent.io might be a good choice. We used this service because we needed to conduct a large number of interviews in a short period of time. We found that it worked well when targeting a specialized international audience (like technical-minded software engineers interested in IoT), but not if screening by specific job titles or roles. If you’re mining your customer database, your CRM or LinkedIn might be the best way to find these folks.

What worked best for us? Personal connections and connections of our colleagues ended up making up the bulk of our user interviews. The takeaway is that individual tools and methods are only one part of a larger strategy for recruiting users. Even if you have a research budget, you should still ping friends and colleagues for help to broaden your network of participants.

No matter how you approach recruiting, you’ll need to screen participants if you haven’t prequalified them. Here are some good tips for writing screeners so you can avoid spending time interviewing people who aren’t really your users.

Once you source users, you then need to get prospects to actually agree to your request.

There’s no one way to do this, but we kept these in mind when writing emails:

• Make them feel special! Point out that they’re in a select group. (“You were selected from a list of our top customers.”) Or personalize your outreach. (“Hey, I saw that we went to the same university.”)
• Use simple, accessible language and short sentences. Make it easy for them to say “Yes.” This can be as simple as asking the user to reply to your message, or including a link to a scheduling service like Calendly.
• They’re doing you a solid, so acknowledge that fact. You might also offer them a “thank you” after the interview in the form of cash or a gift. We offer DigitalOcean credits or gift cards – the longer the session, the higher the value.

If you’re not getting the participants you need, try increasing the types and/or amounts of your incentives to better entice users.

You’ll have limited time with each user, so careful preparation is essential.

Before each interview, we made sure the user had everything they needed to connect with us on the big day. We issued a lookback.io link via Google Calendar with a reminder configured. Lookback gave us the ability to record the interview, and let our teammates observe and comment in real time.

At the beginning of the project, we also gave our team access to a short discussion guide we prepared. The guide was stored as a Google Doc, allowing the team to make a copy of the file for each interview and easily add notes.

Here’s a snippet from our discussion guide:

Intro
* Thanks for joining the call
* Intros
* Purpose of call – to understand tools/solutions/processes you team is using so that we can better serve our customers
* Reminder recording – internal purposes only, not to be shared
* Reminder DO credit/incentive after filling out the Google form questionnaire

Background & Current Infra
* Company & Role: Tell me about your company and your role. What do you do? Who are your customers?
* Skill: How did you get to where you are today?
* How would you describe your current infrastructure? (Scope/State/Scale)

Beginning the call informally in nature can help establish a level of comfort with the user. And if there are remote colleagues sitting in to listen, be sure they remain in a listen-only state to avoid overcrowding your subject. When an interviewee is comfortable, they are far more likely to answer questions about their current challenges with their role, team, and company – openly and honestly. This is what that process looked like for us:
* We started with warmup questions to help build a rapport and put the users at ease with the process. * We avoided leading questions, and instead focused on open-ended questions to solicit deeper insights than pointed questions would. * We didn’t follow the order of questions verbatim. If the participant started deep diving in a specific area, we went along with them. In some cases, we found that certain questions might not be applicable to an individual. In that case, we skipped the question and moved on.

At every stage, we were careful to ask questions to get the answers we needed.

Send the participant a thank-you followup as soon as possible after the interview, and give them instructions on accessing the incentive you promised. If there was anything you wanted to dive deeper on from the interview, this is a great time to ask.

We sent a short survey with simple followup questions to each interviewee, along with a note letting them know we’d send their incentive once they completed the survey (which we informed them about prior to the interview).

Next, share the raw notes from your interview with your team. Don’t worry if they are messy! You might even want to give a tl;dr version in your daily standup.

If you’ve run a good user interview process, you’ve completed several interviews, and have notes and recordings from each. Now you need to identify common themes throughout your interviews and synthesize the data into actionable conclusions for your team.

The synthesis method you choose varies by the type of user research you’re running. For instance, if you’re running a usability test, a list of observed usability issues and pain points prioritized by severity and frequency will be more helpful and actionable to you than a word cloud.

To get to the next level, present the insights (along with the customer quotes that contributed to them) in your team or company all-hands meeting. And include those insights in the onboarding materials for new hires. In many cases, it’s not hard to convert the customer’s journey into a single slide that’s easy to understand for both new and tenured team members.

We hope this helps you start your own user research project – or provides a few tools and suggestions you can apply to existing projects.

If you have questions or would like to share how you’re incorporating user interviews into your product development process, please leave a comment below. We’d love to hear about your user research needs and will try to answer any followup questions you might have.