User Interviews

User interviews serve the purpose of uncovering opportunities for innovation and for illuminating solutions to problems.

Generative interviews are used in the discovery phase of the development process when you’re looking for opportunities to solve for. Scoped interviews are used when a topic of interest has been identified and you’d like to gain a deeper understanding.

Planning

1. Identify your research objectives
2. Develop your interview questions
3. Establish timelines and resources required:
   1. Recording equipment
   2. Personnel
   3. Location, or connectivity if remote

Here is a generative interview template

Here is a scoped interview template

Recruiting

For generative interviews, recruit users on a regular cadence for continuous, wide and varied feedback.

For scoped interviews, recruit 5-8 users considering the following criteria:

1. Engagement (active vs inactive users)
2. Technical literacy
3. Location
4. Age
5. Role
6. Experience with the CHT

Agree on a mutually convenient time and date – if doing remote research, make sure you give the time and date in your users timezone. For interviews scheduled a week or more in advance, follow up a week before the interview and again the day before. Avoid user burnout by repeatedly recruiting the same users unless they have consented to be part of a study series.

Executing

1. Start the call and ensure it’s still a good time to speak with the user
2. Explain the purpose of the interview, what questions will be covered and the time it might take
3. Allow the users to ask any questions
4. Ask permission to record the conversation and start recording
5. Begin the interview guide
6. Once all topics have been covered, ask the user if they have any questions or anything they’d like to discuss
7. Thank them for their time and let them know their feedback is valuable to improving the CHT

Tips:

• Be warm and professional
• Listen lots, speak little
• Focus on one question at a time
• Don’t share your assumptions or hypotheses
• Do not influence the user by asking leading questions
• Give users time to think about the question and take a moment before rephrasing it if they don’t understand
• Give users the chance to ask questions themselves
• Record your session or have someone take notes so you can focus on being present

Here is a recording of a sample interview.

Synthesizing

1. Identify insights or key findings from user feedback from the interviews
2. Categorize them into themes
3. Review all insights within each theme to create an actionable problem statement

The problem statement should be a human-centered explanation of the issue to be addressed or challenge to solve.