‍User interviews are one of the most powerful UX research tools to help you understand what your users need, what their motivations are, and what makes them frustrated. Explore when and how to run user interviews, and how to analyze the results.

When to run user interviews

User interviews are one-on-one sessions with current or prospective users of your digital product or service, conducted by UX researchers or other members of the product teams. It’s a fundamental qualitative research method in UX, focusing on learning about the attitudes of the interview participants, with the goal of uncovering the needs, motivations, and pain points of a target audience. 

It can be especially useful in the following 4 scenarios.

1. Discovery: for informed early-stage decisions

Before you design a new product, you need to make sure you’re solving the right problem. Conducting discovery user interviews can help you go in the right direction whether building a brand-new product or wanting to create new features but not sure where to start.

2. Exploration for new features: to confirm user needs

Similarly to discovery, when you have a new idea, you should check whether it meets actual user needs. 

Conducting the interviews first can save you from spending time and money on features nobody really asked for, and may help you discover needs you haven’t thought of before.

3. Understand the "why" behind user behavior

You may notice a trend in your analytics or observe behavior on heatmaps, but oftentimes it isn’t clear what is driving these trends. In these situations, conducting user interviews can help you find the missing context, and identify barriers and enablers behind people's actions.

4. Persona development: to have a clear picture of your users

It’s essential to always have a clear picture of the users you are creating products for. Laying out the behavioral archetypes of your target audience can help you design for real user needs instead of assumptions. 

Defining user personas based on in-depth user interviews will make them more accurate and ensure you are building products with real user needs in mind.

How to run user interviews

Since a research project with user interviews is not simply sitting down and asking questions from random participants, it doesn’t start at the beginning of the first interview session. Careful preparation is important, so following this methodical approach is essential to make sure you will get meaningful insights.

Step 1: Preparing your research plan

You should start each research project by creating a research plan. 

The research plan is a simple document where:

• you briefly write down the background of your study, 
• the research objectives, 
• and collect the main questions you want your research to answer

A well-structured plan also helps align stakeholders, making sure everyone is on the same page about the research goals and expected outcomes.

Writing a user research plan can also prove helpful in collecting and evaluating assumptions, as well as any possible bias that can interfere with results. By acknowledging these early on, you can adjust your approach to give space for a more objective research study.

What should your research plan contain?

1. Research objectives
   Include the background of the research project, as well as its objectives and the most important research questions.
2. Research method(s)
   You should create a plan for research questions, not for pre-decided research methods. Working on the research plan can help you decide or validate what will be the most suitable research method to use during your project.
3. Participants: the right target audience for your research study
   If you want your research to deliver valuable findings, talking to the right people with relevant insights is essential. At the same time, you have to consider business needs, for example, the location of the target audience.
4. Number of sessions
   The right number will depend on your study and the number of user segments. Regardless of your number, always recruit more people than you actually need as a buffer for possible cancellations and no-shows.
5. Location of the sessions
   In-person or on a remote meeting platform? Consider the pros and cons of both, and which one fits your plan better.
6. Schedule
   At this planning stage, you can also create a roadmap for your project. Plan how much time you’ll need for preparation, how many user interview sessions you’ll conduct and allocate ample time for analyzing and synthesizing the interview findings.

Step 2: Recruiting participants for your user interviews

Before jumping into recruitment, you should think of other tools and documents you should prepare. Do you need to prepare a consent form? Do you have a privacy policy ready? You may already have these important documents ready, but if you don’t, you should look into creating them. At this point, you may also need to prepare a booking platform connected to your calendar to make scheduling more easy.

Recruitment channels

Social networks

If you are conducting discovery research, you can try looking for participants in social media groups that are in connection with the focus of your research, or other platforms, such as Reddit or Slack groups. 

If you try this option, make sure to always check the group rules before you start posting about your study. You should also keep in mind that not all target audiences can be reached this way: while recruiting sports enthusiasts for a B2C product could work out this way, finding cyber security professionals in Facebook groups for a B2B venture may be more tricky.

Research platforms

If your manual recruitment didn’t work out, or you are looking for a faster solution, there are several platforms that maintain large panels of possible participants designed to help with recruitment, as well as taking care of managing incentives for you. 

Beware, though: while you can find great participants for your projects on these platforms, there are many individuals who recognise these platforms as an easy way to make money, and will try to apply to any study that reaches them, even if they’re not actually a good fit.

Your userbase

In case you want to talk to current users of a product you’re working on, you can reach out to them directly. Marketing can help with messaging newsletter subscribers, and in-app notifications can be set up by the product team. Keep in mind that these will segment, and therefore not 100% represent your user base.

Recruitment can prove to be tricky, especially if you are looking for a niche audience. Here we collected some popular ways we do it, but if you want to go more deep in the topic, check out our article on recruitment methods. 

Step 3: Writing the interview guide

User interview types

Start by selecting which type of interview works best for our research objectives.

Structured interviews have a set number of questions with a set order. Because of these constraints, they resemble surveys more than explorative interviews. They can also feel unnatural, as they don’t leave room for follow-up questions or a natural flow between topics based on the interviewees’ answers.

Unstructured interviews are on the other end of the spectrum with only a topic to guide without any questions prepared. During these interviews it’ is easy to get sidetracked, making it harder to stay focused on research goals. Also, without a clear structure, you might end up with a lot of interesting but unfocused information that’s difficult to process during the synthesis.

Semi-structured user interviews are a sweet spot between these two approaches. These contain the main questions to be answered during the interview, but allow for a flexible flow and follow-up questions during the sessions.

We at UX studio prefer semi-structured interviews and we advise you to conduct these during your research projects as well. For this reason, in the rest of this article, we’ll share tips on how to plan and conduct these types of interviews.

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User interview scripts

Generally, you should follow this 4-step structure.

1. Introduction

You should start with an introduction section where you talk about why you are conducting the interview as well as practical information, such as introducing possible observers and giving information on recording the session. 

It’s useful to make notes in your script about everything you will want to mention here, as even though this will take only a minute or two, some essential information will be mentioned here that you won’t want to forget during the actual user interviews.

2. Warm-up questions

After the introduction, you should prepare some warm-up questions. These questions should serve to provide some background information about the participants, but they can also be used as a “second screener,” checking if the participant really matches your criteria or somehow slipped through your original screener.

3. Core interview questions

After the warm-up, your core interview questions should follow, divided into larger topics you will want to cover. Since this core part will be taking up most of the time of the interviews, you should carefully plan it, so we will give you tips on how to build up these questions in the following sections.

4. Wrapping up the interview

Before ending the user interview, you should plan some time for additional thoughts. In your interview script, it may look like only one extra question to your participant if there is anything related to the topics you’ve been discussing that they would like to add, but oftentimes a lot of interesting additional information is shared by participants at this point. You should also plan for some questions from your observers before taking notes of the closing information you’ll share before saying goodbyes.

Step 4: conducting the interviews

While semi-structured interviews don’t allow for total control, there are ways to make sure you get the most meaningful insights from your participants.

The first answers often don’t reveal the true motivations or pain points, so you should always dig deeper. If you miss this step, you can easily find yourself only having information on behaviors without knowing what the real reasons or motivations are. This can lead to making assumptions which can bias the whole research study. You shouldn't be afraid to investigate a topic and use the “5 whys” technique of asking “Why?” many times until you feel that you truly understand the problem.

✅ “Why did you read reviews before you purchased the product?”

✅ “What led you to that conclusion?”

✅ “What do you mean when you say it was confusing?”

During the user interviews, you want all your attention to be on your interviewee. Starting to take interview notes during the session will make you miss some of the things your participants say. It would be painful to realise you missed something important and didn’t follow up on it only after the interview when you are listening to the recording.

To make sure you’re not missing anything important, only take notes of topics that come up and you want to follow up on during the sessions. These should not be more than a few keywords that will remind you of what you want to dig deeper into. If recording is not possible, you can have someone join to take notes, or use an AI note-taking application with your interviewee’s permission.

How to analyze user interview insights

Your interview study doesn't end with you having successfully conducted your sessions. To get to those meaningful insights, you need to gather your notes and recordings and start to synthesize the findings.

You’ll have the best result by reviewing your recordings to take notes of key points. You should be focusing on motivations, pain points, and unexpected insights, instead of writing down everything word for word. If your observers took notes for you, make sure to review those, and adjust them if needed.

This is also a great time to collect quotes. While you are listening to your recordings, write down those quotes that you feel are on point, or truly encapsulate what the interviewee wanted to share with you.

Taking your time is essential here, as good notes will be the basis of your next step of synthesizing your findings. 

The next step is analysis and synthesis, where you identify patterns, group insights, and turn all that raw data into insightful takeaways. 

Here are some common techniques you may employ at this stage:

• Affinity mapping
  Organizing user feedback into clusters based on themes or recurring topics. This helps spot patterns and prioritize insights, making it easier to see what matters most to users.
• Creating user personas
  Identifying common patterns in user behaviors, motivations, and pain points, and grouping similar people into user archetypes. Personas should include a background, key motivations, frustrations, and typical behaviors, making it easier for teams to design with real user needs in mind.
• Journey mapping
  Outlining the key steps people take to achieve a goal, by mapping out each stage of the process. Journey maps also include users’ thoughts, emotions, pain points, possible touchpoints with a product, and opportunities to focus on.

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How to report your findings

At this point you have a lot of data in front of you. You have all the interview notes, clusters of post-its from your affinity mapping, and maybe some personas or journey maps. As the last step, you should focus on making all of this digestible for those you will present your research findings. 

There are a wide variety of ways to report and present insights. You know your organization or client the best, so think carefully about the format your stakeholders will be the most likely to engage with. Regardless of the platform you’ll use, make sure to collect only the most important insights and UX research artifacts for your final presentation.

Summary

A successful research project with user interviews is a complex process that requires meticulous planning and strong interviewing skills. There are many sub-steps along the way and you should make sure to never skip anything as that could jeopardise the success of your study.

By following our  guide, you’ll be well-equipped to run insightful user interviews that lead to better product decisions. If you need more information, download our detailed guide for user interview with extra steps and in-detail recommendations. 

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