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Conducting User Interviews



Conducting User Interviews

One of the most important things you can do to improve your product and develop your roadmap is to talk to your users. You should be talking to your users as early as possible, gathering feedback, and iterating your product based off the feedback.

You want to dig out true user motivations and needs. This means you shuold ignore compliments and fluff. True motivation will lie in their actions, concrete things your users have done in the past, such as the way they use your product.

You want to avoid talking about your idea, and you want to get as specific as possible. Also avoid talking too much in general, you're interview them, not the other way around.

Here are some great questions you can start with:

  1. What is the hardest part about doing (insert problem you're solving)?
  2. What don't you like about what you've tried in the past?
  3. Can you tell me about the last time you tried to (insert problem you're solving)?
  4. Why was doing that so hard? What about the process, specifically, was the worst?

Some questions you should avoid:

  1. Do you think X is a good idea?
  2. Would you buy a product that (insert solution you're trying to create)?

As an example, let's have a look at DropBox.

According to the founder, Drew Houston, he initally formed the idea during his time at MIT. At MIT, he worked on lots of projects with classmates, and working on projects with classmates meant that it was tricky to sync files and keep revisions updated.

Let's fit this into the user interview questions.

  1. What is the hardest part about working on group projects? It's really hard to sync files and share them with classmates, especially with so many revisions.
  2. What don't you like about what you've tried in the past? Emailing each other back and forth gets super disorganized.
  3. Can you tell me about the last time you tried to work on group projects? A couple of weeks ago. I worked on a lab where we had to keep sending our paper back and forth.
  4. Why was doing that so hard? What about the process, specifically, was the worst? I kept losing track of revisions, and would end up working on the wrong files.
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