User interviews
❓What is it
- This is a cornerstone of qualitative research, and is recommended that some user research is always conducted during discovery.
- This technique supports and enhances other available qualitative and quantitative research, by providing depth and nuance that other research methods may miss. Its conversational nature can capture their thoughts, feelings and motivations, enabling deeper sentiment analysis around the problem space.
- For qualitative research, the right sample size is between 5 and 10 per target profile to capture all key emergent themes - the saturation point
👥Who
- User researcher. It can benefit having 2 people per interview, one acting as a note taker.
🛠 Running the technique
- Prepare - Set a goal and success metrics for your interviews, write a customer interview guide with open-ended interview questions, and recruit the right candidates that fit each target profile. Be mindful of leading questions. Ensure sufficient time to allow for unexpected topics that may surface. Prepare more questions than you think you’ll need. Anticipate different responses and create follow-up based questions based on your research goals. Don’t forget the questions are a guide, not a script.
- Interview - Employ an empathetic approach, to help build a rapport with the interviewee, with a strong focus on active listening. Be cognisant of biases throughout the interview- examples include confirmation bias, anchoring bias, Hawthorne effect. It can be helpful to have a colleague present to focus on detail note taking. An alternative is to record the interview. Be mindful of user research ethics, being open and transparent on how the interviewee’s information and persian details will be stored and used.
- Insights - Use a visual centric tool like Miro or Mindmap to capture and summarise key themes, sentiments and observations associated to the research goal and problem space across multiple interviews. Identify if saturation has been reached for that user profile