User Interviews

Find what’s hiding in users’ heads.

Customer insights are the bedrock of breakthrough design. Whether data helps shape a new product or validate and refine something that already exists, research puts the “user” in user-centered design. You likely have strong suspicions about what it’s like to be in users’ shoes. Find out if your suspicions are accurate.

With user interviews, we gather first-hand insight and develop real empathy for the problem space. We help you gather feedback, reactions, and insights from users themselves through moderated interviews.

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Our user interview process

User interviews are focused on learning about the problem space, but the process is similar to that of usability testing, which focuses on how users complete tasks in prototypes or live products.

Identifying the questions you need to answer

The interview process starts with identifying goals and questions. As your team brainstorms user needs and pain points in an upfront discovery workshop, we plot insights along 2 axes: importance and certainty. When something is important but you don’t have evidence about it, it’s something we need to learn more about.

Recruiting the right participants

The nature of your team’s big unknowns informs who we need to talk to. Together, we identify screening criteria for research participants and define a recruiting strategy. Depending on the criteria, we might recruit from a panel, or work with you to connect with contacts in your organization’s network.

We set up the communications you’ll need and the scheduling experience so that prospective participants know what’s going on at all times. Then, we’ll partner with you on an interview guide rooted in the questions we’ve identified together.

Leading the sessions

Once participants are recruited and scheduled, we will conduct one-on-one moderated user interviews. With thoughtful moderation, we tease out qualitative conclusions to generate new ideas and validate working hypotheses.

From these conversations, we can answer questions, gather feedback on their experience with your current product or alternative products, and generate new ideas from users that may not have previously been considered.

If your schedule allows for it, you can listen in on these interviews while they are happening and debrief with us after each session. With participants’ permission, interviews will be recorded.

Analysis and insights

When interviews are complete, we will analyze what we heard and deliver an easy-to-digest overview of the themes, ideas, and recommendations from the study. Map out your new product experience confident in what users need.

““I was most impressed by their willingness and ability to understand the product we were building and the demands of the users for the product.””

— Marc Maples | Director of Product Management @ DataScan

More about how user interviews work

User interviews often include the following milestones:
- User interview kickoff
  - Establish goals and key questions
  - Define participant screening criteria and/or recruiting pool
  - Determine incentives
  - Participant screening review
- Interview guide review
- Moderated interviews & debriefs
- Distribution of incentives to participants
- Workshop to review themes, findings, and recommendations
User interviews often include the following deliverables:
- Participant screener & scheduling workflow
- Interview guide
- Participant incentives
- Recordings and transcripts from user interviews
- Presentation of findings and recommendations
- Notes from all meetings
- Recordings of all meetings & sessions

Ready to talk specifics?

Book a free consultation to dig into pricing and timeline.