Pitfalls from user interviews

When interviewing users only ask them questions that are about the past, or are currently true.

For example:

• What is the hardest part of job X?
• What is your favourite Y?

These questions will give you information that people are good at giving. People are bad at predicting the future or their future behaviours, so questions like these are likely to lead to poor results:

• How much would you pay for X?
• Would you think of using Y?

Be careful with the 5 whys

The five whys technique helps you get to the cause of an action, but there are two problems in a user interview:

• Asking why can seem like you are implying the thing they did was wrong
• A user may get to the cause in just one why, you don’t need to go five deep

You need to counter act these by:

• Warning the user you are going to ask ‘why’ a lot and that is it not the sign of a bad answer
• Stop asking ‘why’ once you have got to the understanding you need

Full data capture

As well as asking a user direct product questions, you can also get data to help with marketing and other departments by asking questions like:

• What did you do before and after X? (triggers)
• What other products did you use with Y? (value chain)
• Who else do you know that has this problem (lead users)