How to run the best user interviews in just 10 steps

Are you a Product Manager? Then you are THE Customer advocate on your team.

As a PM,  You are in the unique position to influence the trajectory of the product with not just user data, but also with user sentiment.

That’s why it’s really important to involve target users from the very beginning.

User interviews are a great opportunity for PMs to discover the root causes which drive user behaviors. But often the questions and tasks can be very surface level and monotonous.

As a result, PMs usually end up with a list of what users liked and disliked, but they don’t have great takeaways on how to create user-driven solutions.

The more you center the interview around the user, the more users will feel comfortable to share their ideas with you.

As as a result, your team will have more user-driven feedback and solutions to iterate on.

Here are 10 steps on how to drive an Engaging user interview from start to finish.

1. Identify the stage of your product life cycle.

2. Complete pre-testing prep:

• Define 2-3 objectives of user testing
• Identify key features and user KPIs you want to test
• Create a Scenario to test most of the features
• Create a series of directed and undirected user tasks
• Preview your script with a team member
• To get new users, post a short ad with Screener questions on a Google form on social media sites
• To invite existing users, send a email to existing users that meet target market.  

3. Ask the user to give a brief intro of themselves.  4.  Ask them some warm up questions related to:

• Tell me about your role at your company?  
• Are you currently working with a remote, distributed team?
• What does your typical day look like?  
• How are team meetings structured?  
• What are some of the products you use?
• What do you like or dislike about these product? How often do you use them?
• What sort of tasks do you try to accomplish whilst using them?
• What is the biggest pain point related to [problem/task]?  
• How do you currently overcome these challenges?  
• Are you looking for a solution/alternative?

5. Have the user share their screen and take you through how they use your product. Let them drive the conversation.  

6. Observe actions that the user may not voice.  

7. As they are use different features, ask them:

• What do you see here?  
• What would you do next? Why?  
• Tell me more about that  
• Is this what you expected? Why/Why not?  
• How did you find the overall task?  
• How would improve the process of ...?
• How would you prefer the task flow design?

8. Give users insights on the most common feature requests or upcoming features. Ask them:  

• What do you think? Would that be helpful?
• Why or Why not?  
• What are your thoughts on the task flows? Is it intuitive?
• How would you prefer the task flow design?

9. Towards the end, Ask them:

Product Opportunity Questions:

• What do you think of this product?  
• Why do you think someone would use this product?  
• How do you think this product will help you?  
• What might keep people from using this product?  
• Does this remind you of any other products?  

Product Reaction Questions:

• What is most appealing/hardest part of using this product?  
• Was there anything surprising/unexpected?  
• Was there anything missing that you expected?  
• What could be done to improve this product?

10. Thank them and ask if they are willing to test new updates in the future.  

Bonus Tip 11: Capture all of your feedback on Jeda Ai !

For each tester, open a new board and capture their answers and feedback as the interview progresses. You will have a complete collection of answers sorted by each tester on your dashboard!

We hope you find these steps helpful. Let us know in the comments below on how you drive your user interviews!