How to ace your first user interview
By: Sebastian Stoelen
Tags: User Research, UX, Interview, Qualitative Research

Photo by The Creative Exchange on Unsplash

The goal

The number one thing you need to conduct a great interview is a goal. As mentioned in This is Service Design Doing, it’s of utmost importance that you know what do you want to achieve in this interview.

Are you exploring your problem space in a more general way, or are you looking for answers to very specific questions?

By making your research question very clear, you can ensure the structure and questioning of your interview all contribute to you learning what you want to learn. Without a clear end-goal, your interview will end up like a hot mess of questions and you will soon realize it wasn’t that valuable after all. If you do only one thing to ace your first interview: make sure you have a clear goal in mind.

The plan

Once you have your goal cleared out, we need to come up with a battle plan, a way of achieving your goal. In interviews, this plan comes in the form of a script: a set of questions you will ask your participants. To me, this was the most difficult task of conducting an interview. What helped me a lot was adhering to a clear structure and asking different kinds of questions at different moments in time.

Opening questions

These questions will put your interviewee at ease and strike up an informal conversation to get your interview started.

Example: “Did the link to the meeting work well for you?”

Introductory questions

After the opening question, we start the interview with some easy introductory questions. The goal of these questions is to get the discussion started without bombarding the interviewee with hard questions.

Example: “How often do you go grocery shopping?”

Transition questions

Following some general and easy questions, it’s time to move over to some more difficult questions. At this point, your interviewee should be acquainted with the context and you can dig deeper with some questions that will provide more valuable information concerning your specific goal.

Example: “How do you go about preparing your grocery shopping?”

Key questions

Now’s prime time! If everything went well, your interviewee will be completely at ease in the interview and you can ask them questions concerning the core of your research. These questions are the most important of your interview, so prepare them well and allow for enough time to answer them.

Example: “Are there any parts in the process of grocery shopping that you dislike?”, “Can you explain why these experiences are frustrating for you?”

Closing question

To end your interview with a bang, a good closing question is essential. End the interview with a question where the interviewee can tell his “one more thing” on the topic of your research, or recap some of the earlier answers they gave to make sure you got everything right.

Example: “If there’s one thing that would help you with grocery shopping, what would be it?”

It’s important to keep in mind that the set of questions you’re going to write is just a guide. It will help you structure your interview and make sure it flows well, but if at any point you come up with some additional questions which will deepen your knowledge on your subject, by all means, go for it!

Some things along the way

With your script in hand, it’s you’re almost ready for your interview. To make sure everything runs smoothly, here are some additional tips to get the most out of your interviews.

Talk slowly and leave enough room for your interviewee. If you’re doing the talking all the time, you won’t get much information out of the person sitting in front of you. Leave some breathing room for them, you want to be interrupted!

and leave enough room for your interviewee. If you’re doing the talking all the time, you won’t get much information out of the person sitting in front of you. Leave some breathing room for them, you want to be interrupted! Avoid asking two questions at the same time . This seems easy enough, but it’s a common trap to fall into.

. This seems easy enough, but it’s a common trap to fall into. An interview can be more than just questions and answers. To avoid the monotony of questions and answers, you can spice up your interview by incorporating something different in there. Try out some card sorting, photo or video material, or even a made-up scenario in which you ask an interviewee how he/she would respond.

Last but not least, the single most valuable lesson I’ve learned is to test your script!

Testing leads to failure, and failure leads to understanding. — Burt Rutan

Even if you have the perfect preparation, chances are you will come up with new questions after your first interview, find out some of your questions are unclear, or maybe they don’t add to your goal. In your planning, account for at least one test interview where you can take your script out for a spin. The results of this interview will most likely not be very useful for your research, but will greatly improve the quality of your next interviews.