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.
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.