Nutrition profile


At any stage of your project, learn directly from individual users about their relevant experience to inform defining, understanding, and designing a product or feature.

Cooking time


User interviews can be done in person, on the phone, or using videoconferencing software. Allow 1-1.5 hours for in-person interviews, and 30 minutes for phone or video interviews.

Perfect for


Exploratory research, such as capturing the user's perspectives and opinions, or what they think about using a product. User interviews usually focus less on the product’s usability.

Ingredients


If you’re planning for an in-person or phone interview, prepare for a setup that allows you to type or scribble fast as you'll often want to capture as much details as possible. You'll also want to record the audio as long as the participant gives consent. Here’s what you need for an in-person setup:

For online user interviews, we recommend using Zoom as it provides the options to record meetings and automatically generate transcript, which are helpful for gathering notes and reviewing the conversation.

Regardless of the way you conduct user interviews, there are tools that are designed specifically for capturing insights from the conversation. A tool that we recommend is Reframer, which is part of the Optimal Workshop suite of tools. The tool lets you capture observations by typing short sentences, and adding tags to each of them along the way. It will then generate analysis based on the tags to help you identify patterns.

Prep work


Write a script

Think of the script as a framework that guides your conversation. It should include necessary context for your participant and questions you want to probe into. Ballpark the time needed to answer the questions and make sure you allow room for digression, as you’ll always want to hear more thoughts from your participant.