User Interviews are a vital part of the design process as they provide insights into the needs, behaviors, and motivations of the product users. They are typically performed with potential users of a design during the ideation or early concept development phase.

User interviews follow a structured methodology where the interviewer prepares a list of topics to cover, records what is said during the interview, and systematically analyzes the conversation afterward. The topics can range from users’ feelings, motivations, daily routines, to how they use various products.

User interviews can be conducted in various ways, including over a video or voice call if time is restricted. In projects with sufficient time and resources, an interview may be conducted in the user’s home, and designers might even be flown overseas if the users reside in another country.

There are different types of user interviews, including contextual interviews that take place in the participants’ everyday environment. These provide more insights relating to the environment in which a design will be used. On the other hand, semi-structured interviews are somewhat structured in that you prepare a set of topics you would like to cover during the interview, but still open enough that you can follow leads in the conversation and change the order of topics.

To conduct user interviews effectively:

  1. Set a Goal for Your Interviews: Form a concise, concrete goal for your user interviews—one that’s related to a specific aspect of your users’ behaviors or motivations is ideal.
  2. Prepare Questions: Write a set of interview questions that can help you achieve your goal. The questions may be pre-determined or free-form.
  3. Conduct the Interview: Build a rapport with your participants, explain the purpose of the interview, ask open-ended questions, and make sure your body language keeps interviewees at ease throughout.
  4. Analyze the Data: Use thematic analysis to analyze your interview data and discover the key insights.

However, there are also some drawbacks to user interviews. There’s a difference between what humans say and what they actually do. Human memory is flawed and we can often struggle to recall details as clearly as we would like. Participants often leave out small details because they deem them insignificant.

In conclusion, user interviews are a crucial part of the product design process, as they allow designers to gain insight into the users’ needs, behaviors, and motivations. They provide a great opportunity to meet your users, understand and start to design for them. However, it's important to also complement interviews with observation-based research to attain an accurate and thorough sense of what users really do.

User Interview Process:

1. Open discovery questions

To keep the conversation going you want to ask open questions. Those questions are questions that require more than a single word answer (like yes/no). Avoid starting questions by “did you” / “have you” / “were you” and replace them by “why”, “how”, etc.