Interview Questions

This is an excerpt from Validating Product Ideas by Tomer Sharon. It's a great book. If you like this excerpt you might like the whole book!

Your primary goal during the interview is to encourage the interviewee to tell you stories about things that happened to them in the recent past. These stories will help you get a deeper understanding of who your users are, what motivates them, and why. This is a key point in the interviews – no matter what questions you ask, your goal is extracting those stories about things that happened very recently.

There are many interview questions that will help you get the stories you are looking for. Here is a list of questions to choose from:

Sequence

A sequence of actions or an event is sometimes hard to remember. Keep that in mind and try to help your interviewees come up with steps while asking what happened next.

Example: Walk me through your day yesterday. And then what did you do next?

Guided Tour

Have the interviewee be your guide, almost teacher, of a process, series of actions, achieving a goal, using certain products, etc.

Example: Can we take a look at your e-mail account together?

Specific example

Asking about something specific will provide you with the little details that help you understand the interviewees behavior and choices.

Example: Who did you call from your cell phone earlier today? What did you talk about?

Exhaustive list

While this question might seem impossible to answer, it can surface behaviors you never imagined. For example when you ask "What were all the ways you indulged this week?" you might find that your users have a different opinion about indulgence than your product team.

Example: What are all the different places you went online in the past week? Were there any others?

Peer comparison

Asking about peer behavior and opinions will help you understand the interviewee's behavior and perspective better, but is not a way to learn about peers. If you are interested in peer behavior and opinions, schedule a research session directly with them.

Example: Think about the last three times your husband sent you photos. Did he send them the same way or differently each time?

Other viewpoint comparison