Key User Interview Questions to Ask Customers

User research tells you more about your target audience to better understand them. These interviews are typically live, but you can also do digital user interviews or customer surveys to learn more about your target market.

User interviews are more effective than other types of user research because you're speaking live to another human being and can ask follow-up questions to learn more. While you can use free questionnaires to learn more about your customers, you can't ask follow-up questions based on their answers, so they may not be as effective.

You can use user interviews for user experience research, which can help you develop better products and services or improve upon existing ones. For instance, you can use it to learn about your website experience or users' experiences with different products.

Unlike other forms of user research, user interviews are live, structured, and generate qualitative data. Therefore, they're considered much more valuable than net promoter score (NPS), although it's crucial to use qualitative and qualitative data when learning about your target audience.

User interviews are important for marketing, product development, and overall business strategy because they help you understand the user. If you don't know what problem your business is trying to solve or how to solve it, you can use these interviews as a valuable resource. You may know about the general problem, but without more information, you won't be able to develop the perfect solution that meets your audience's needs.

No market research method is perfect, and user interviews have their limitations. For instance, the information comes directly from the user, and the human memory isn't very accurate. If you're asking someone about their past experiences, they might provide you with inaccurate data because they simply don't remember. Additionally, you risk participants leaving out important information or not being forthcoming.

You'll have to learn how to write user interview questions to ensure you're making the most out of your time with your target audience. Asking the wrong questions will yield unhelpful results.

How to prepare for user interviews

User interviews can be effective market research when done right. Unfortunately, there are many ways to do them wrong. To help, here are some tips for preparing to interview your users:

Define research goals

Why are you performing user interviews? Are you developing a new product and wondering whether there's a market for it before you begin production, or are you wondering how you can better communicate with your target audience?

Always define your research goals before writing your user interview questions to ensure you ask the right questions. You only have a limited time with these individuals, so it's best to spend it wisely.

Identify your target audience

User research interviews should only be done for your target market. There's no reason to interview individuals who won't be interested in your products or services.

If you want honest feedback from the right people, you'll need to ask them leading questions, so it helps to know everything there is to know about them. You can conduct market research beforehand to help in writing user interview questions and ensure you collect the best possible data.

Select the right interview format

There are many ways to perform the interview process, but the best results come from live interviews because they give you the opportunity to ask follow-up and probing questions to learn even more about your customers.

Good user interview questions require someone to answer thoughtfully, so follow-up questions can help engage your interviewee while avoiding awkward silence and helping them provide more information when necessary. If you don't have the ability to perform a live user interview, you email surveys to subscribers with the same direct questions.

Recruit participants

Recruiting participants is one of the most challenging parts of using user interviews for UX research. Most people want to be paid for their time, which may include giving them a free product or cash for taking part in your survey. If you plan to interview people with a survey, you can ask that they fill out a form to participate.

Recruiting participants for focus groups is a little more complicated than interviewing your existing customers because you may not have had any interactions with them. Ultimately, you'll have to market your interview to try to get people to participate.

When interviewing people, you should be prepared with written questions that can help prevent awkward silences and allow them to provide honest feedback.

There are many types of user interview questions that are easy to answer and can help you make individuals feel more comfortable speaking with you.

User interviews typically consist of open-ended questions, so it's important to tell them there are no wrong answers and to answer honestly. Some of the best interview questions you can use include:

• Introduction and warm-up questions: Customer intro questions help them feel more comfortable being interviewed. You can ask general questions about their day and how they're doing to start the conversation.
• Demographic questions: Demographic questions cover the basic information you'll need to ensure you know everything about your target audience. Location, age, gender, and so forth can help you effectively target customers during marketing.
• Behavioral questions: More specific questions about a consumer's behavior, such as why they're motivated to buy certain products, can give you insight into your target audience's behavior when it comes to shopping.
• Pain points and challenges questions: Always ask open-ended questions about your end user's pain points to allow them to provide honest feedback. You can include closed questions if you think you might get a wide variety of answers and want to limit responses.
• Product or service usage questions: You should ask your customers general questions about the products and services they use regularly, specifically those similar to your product or service offering.
• User experience and satisfaction questions: User experience and satisfaction questions are those that deal directly with usability tests. For instance, you can collect interesting feedback when letting users try your product and ask them about their experience with it.
• Product or service improvement questions: Improvement questions detail how consumers feel your product or service can improve. They might mention things like updating your features, adding new features, or the quality of the product.
• Final questions and closure: Your final questions should include anything else you need to know to collect the best interview data. At the end of the interview, make sure to thank participants for their time and give them your contact information in case they think of anything else they want to share.

Follow-up questions and probing techniques

Follow-up questions can help you delve deeper into learning about your customers. For example, if you ask a user about their experience, you can ask if they can go into more detail to help you understand.

Since you're asking primarily open questions, they may have a lot to say for some reasons and very little to say for others. Asking them to clarify why they came to these particular conclusions can help you understand them more. A few probing questions you can use include;

• What do you mean?
• Why do you say that?
• Is there anything else you want to add?
• Can you give me an example?

To successfully conduct a user interview, you must have clear goals, willing participants, interview questions, and notes. Not everyone is a skilled interviewer, so it helps to have prepared follow-up questions.

Define your research goals

Identifying your goals for the research project can help you ask more specific questions. For instance, if you want to know how users feel about your product, you can ask them to test it beforehand. Meanwhile, if you want simply to learn more about your target market, you can ask them more general questions.

Prepare your interview questions

Writing user interview questions beforehand can ensure you're prepared and make participants feel more comfortable since it can prevent awkward silences. You can write an interview script to help you put your mind at ease and ensure you're asking the right questions.

Conduct the interview and take notes

Always take notes when conducting your interviews. You can use video recordings with the participant's permission to review the data, but it's always best to have your own notes.

Use probing techniques to explore user feedback

Asking follow-up questions to probe your participants will ensure you get the best possible feedback.

Analyze the data and summarize the results

After your user interview, you can review your detailed notes and video recordings to analyze the data. Look for patterns and common themes, summarize your survey results, and use what you've learned to improve your product development and marketing efforts.

While live user interviews give you the opportunity to engage your participants, they're not always possible for small businesses. Use Mailchimp's marketing tools to create user surveys to learn more about your target market and their perceptions of your brand.