User interviews

Most plays in this playbook involve minimal preparation. But the user interview play is different. Doing the prep work thoroughly means that you’ll get far more insights out of your sessions.

Choosing the right play

User interview is the best method for generative research around users and their needs. The purpose of user interviews is to explore the user’s perspective, uncover their challenges, and identify opportunities for service delivery or improvement. Generative interviews can also be conducted in the early stages of the design process to inform ideation and concept development.

If you need to evaluative user research, the usability testing play will be more useful for you, as it helps to assess specific features of services, products, or prototypes that you need validation around.

Decide on what to gather information about

Before you can create your user interview guide, you first need to work out what experience you’re going to analyse.

Here are a few questions that can help you decide what you need to understand:

1. Are you researching an existing part of a service or product in its current state?
2. Are you testing two competing services or products to decide which one to implement?
3. Do you need to evaluate the experience of a product or service?
4. Do you want feedback on the service delivery process?
5. How many rounds of interviews do you want to do?

The answers to these questions can help you find the right participants and write a user interviews guide that will give you relevant insights.

Current vs ideal state

Current state

If you’re wanting to analyse an existing product or service, you can use the interviews to review the current experience to visualise its users’ journey and spot improvement opportunities.

Ideal state

If you’re looking for ways to generate new or improved solutions, you may interview users mainly to understand their needs and preferences, helping to shape the development of services and products that meet expectations.

Form a user interview team

There are 3 key roles when it comes to interviewing users: The interviewer, scribe, and silent observer.

The interviewer

Anyone can facilitate a user interview, but typically a Project Manager (PM), Project Officer, Designer, Business Analyst, or Communications Officer fills the role of interviewer. Don't try and be both the interviewer and scribe – you'll get distracted and won't be actively listening.

The scribe

You'll also want another person from your team along to play the role of scribe and generally be your co-pilot. The scribe is responsible for taking verbatim notes of the participant during the interview. It’s important to take verbatim notes to avoid paraphrasing which typically results in diluted and biased data. Verbatim notes are word-for-word notes on exactly what customers said during the interview. Verbatim notes should be captured digitally by the dedicated scribe.

Download our notetaking template to see an example.

Silent observer – optional

Including a silent observer is a great way to make sure you don't overlook any potential insights. Their job is to absorb the conversation and listen for any themes, behaviours, or connections the interviewer and scribe are too busy to catch.

Invite people to join the interviews with you as scribes or silent observers. Aim to send invitations about 2 weeks in advance, you can also attach a link to the play for people to look at ahead of time. Make sure you have enough support to cover all the interviews you have scheduled.

Calendar meeting request for user interviews

Find the right users to interview

Sounds obvious, doesn't it? But don’t rush through this step! Consider your goals for the user interviews and make sure you're recruiting real people. Did you uncover who your target users are during the initial stages of your project? Use this to inform who you need to recruit for interviewing. For more guidance, consider the following plays:

• Problem definition
• Desktop research
• User research planning

Aim for a balance of user types within your identified user group. This could include a mix of age, gender, digital literacy, general literacy, education, employment status, geographic location, accessibility needs, and what services they engage with or other characteristics specific to your project.

For each round, aim to interview with at least 5-10 users to ensure that you are covering a diverse group that represents the users of your product or service. You might need to speak with more users in the early stages, particularly if you have several groups of users with different needs.

Studies show that gathering the perspective of 5 people helps you uncover roughly 90% of usability issues. It's important to note that this assumes you can do multiple rounds of interviews with a variety of users and iterate the product or service as you go. User interviews are not once-off activities, you will get the best results by doing many rounds over time. Consider how can you make user interviews a part of your business-as-usual product or service improvement plans.

Choosing the best location to run the interview with your user

If the session is in person, you can invite the user into a work meeting space to conduct the interview. Try and choose a room that is available to the public, is reasonably inviting, is accessible, and has good transport options.

If an in-person session isn't possible, a video call with screen-sharing functionality can work. You can set up a Teams meeting and invite them via email. Make sure to include any scribes and observers on the invite.

Recruit your users

Identify your target users with screener questions

Screener questions are a set of questions used to filter and select participants who meet specific criteria for a usability study or user research. These questions are typically asked before the interview session to ensure that the participants possess the desired characteristics, demographics, or experience level necessary for the study.

Screener questions are often included in the participant recruitment process. When seeking participants for interviews, researchers can use screener questions in surveys, online forms, or phone interviews to filter and select individuals who match the desired criteria. This allows researchers to assemble a suitable participant pool before moving forward with scheduling and conducting the interview sessions.

The specific screener questions will vary depending on the goals and requirements of your project. It is essential to carefully design and select questions that ensure the recruited participants align with the target audience, allowing for meaningful insights and actionable feedback.

There is a screener section in the user interview guide template below.

Recruitment process

You will have to go through one of the participant recruitment processes to get them to come along to a session. This might be making use of agency-specific customer panels like Transport Talk, industry user research platforms like Askable, accessing Queenslanders with a disability via the QEngage partnership, or using a market research company to find and schedule them into your sessions. These may or may not require a request to approve contactor (RTAC) or other internal approvals.

Consider participant consent when planning your recruitment. What are you seeking their informed consent for – will the research data only be used for this project or potentially reused later? Think about when in the process you will seek consent. You can do it during the screening and recruitment process, or you can do it at the beginning of the testing session. There is an example of a participant consent form in the user interview guide template below.

Recruitment may take up to 6 weeks once the approval processes are factored in.

Contact us if you need guidance through the participant recruitment process.

Arrange your user interview sessions

Once you have your approach approved, you will be able to arrange the user interviews.
Make sure to include buffer time between each session (and don't forget a lunch break, doing interviews is tiring!). This will allow you to do a quick debrief with the team and reset for the next session. If you are doing 1-hour sessions it's likely you can get 4 or 5 interviews per day.

Write a user interview guide

Background and warmup questions

Before jumping into the interview questions, it’s always good to consider the general questions about your participant in the context of the product or service you are researching. This not only acts as a warmup for the participant, but it will help you to build rapport and empathise better with users’ perspectives.

For example, if you were looking to analyse the user experience of transferring vehicle registration online, you might ask background questions like this:

• Why would you need to transfer ownership of your vehicle?
• Have you transferred ownership of a vehicle before?
• What’s your current understanding of the requirements for changing the ownership of your vehicle?

Interview question

In order to interview participants about their perspective, you need to have a set of questions that relates with their experience with the service or product.

It’s good practice to give participants the opportunity to explain their experience as a timeline that sets the steps and activities while providing context around feelings and thoughts along the way.

Before defining the set of questions, first, write a list of potential goals that users may have. Ask yourself: What are the most important things that your users must be able to accomplish in the context of your project?

Sticking to our example of transferring vehicle registration online, users must be able to:

• Learn more about transferring vehicle registration process
• Understand what they need to transfer vehicle registration
• Complete the online transfer registration form online

Once you’ve figured out what the user goals are, you select questions better aligned with user needs and perspectives.

Writing interview questions

Keep in mind that your interview must encourage participants to think out loud, so thinking about open-ended and thought-provoking questions will allow for a deeper exploration of user perspectives, motivations, and desires, providing better insights for product and service improvement.

Focus on:

• Open-ended questions, that encourage users to provide unrestricted answers.
• Thought-provoking questions, that stimulate conversation and opinion sharing.

Avoid

• Leading questions that prime users by suggesting responses.
• Closed questions, with “yes” or “no” answers.
• Vague or ambiguous questions that are difficult to understand and may confuse participants

After defining your questions, make sure that:

• You gather your team’s feedback about the questions
• Remember everything that you wanted to know and ask users about as many of the right topics as possible during the interview
• Construct clear, non-leading questions better than you would in the moment
• Overcome your stress or fatigue by having questions on hand to refer to!

Get ready for interview sessions

You’re finally going to interview your users – yay!
Here’s a checklist you can use to ensure you’re prepared:

1. You have copies of questions for everyone in your team (either printed or open in another window of your device)
2. You have information about your participants handy, including their name and their answers to the screener questions, if appropriate.
3. You have a signed participant consent form.
4. The interview room (if in person) is tidy and has a relaxed vibe.
5. Your background (if online) is tidy, blurred, or you are using an officially approved image.
6. Your recording device is charged (if not using a recording feature in your video conferencing tool)
7. Make sure your interview team understands their roles so you can operate like a well-oiled machine. Scribes should focus on taking verbatim notes, and observers should only ask questions at the very end.
8. Make sure you have allocated time for someone to save and store the interview recordings. Sometimes it can be slow to transfer between Teams sites or internal drives so others can view them.

Now for the actual interview! Think of the following steps as suggestions, and feel free to tweak them to suit your needs and your style.

1. Housekeeping – 5 mins

Welcome the user and thank them for coming. If you are conducting the session online and will need them to share their screen, get them to test this now.

Ask if it's ok to record the session so you've got everything verbatim in case the scribe falls behind a bit. Assure them the recording, and the session is only for internal use and capability development. Here you may also ask the users to sign or read out loud the consent form.

2. Warm up questions – 10 mins

Build rapport with the questions from the user interview guide. Part of the foundation you're laying here is establishing trust with users. Pay attention to cues like body language and tone. Does your user feel at ease?

3. Prime the participant – 5 mins

Let your participant know that you will be walking through the experience provided by a service or product. It's important make them feel at ease before they explain their experience to ensure they provide honest feedback. Here are some points to help guide you:

• "We’re testing the service, not you. If something doesn’t make sense let me know. It means we need to make improvements to the process.”
• “None of us here today had any involvement with the design, so don’t feel like you need to hold back with any negative feedback you may have.” (This is a great tip, even if you were involved in the design!)
• “Please think out loud so we can understand your thought process.”
• “If you have any questions during the activity, I may not be able to answer them. I’m here to see how you used the service (or insert the name of your product here) ...”

4. Experience questions– 20 mins

Make sure you are capturing a tangible timeline of how the product or service occurred through the customer's lens. They may forget some things or have experiences that diverge from other customers’ reports, it’s ok, there will be an opportunity to group all your customers' information later.

Encourage participants to think out loud, asking open-ended questions to empathise and contextualise the process, steps and feelings experienced by customers along the service delivery.

• Why did you start engaging with the [product or service]?
• Could you describe your experience in detail?
• What were all the steps you took during the experience?
• I want to make sure I understand this. Can you explain more?
• What did you like/not like during the described experience?
• What was good/bad during the described experience?

5. Closing questions – 5 mins

This is your chance to ask questions you didn’t get a chance to ask during the experience questions. You may also ask evaluative questions at this stage like, ‘On a scale of 1-7, 1 being extremely negative and 7 being extremely positive, how would you rate the service experience you described today?’  Or ‘How would you describe your experience?’.

6. Observer questions – 10 mins

If you have observers in the room, and they have additional questions, now is the time.

The questions should prompt deeper thought and reflection. It'll either sharply illustrate the service journey, or make the user realize that maybe any perspective isn't so critical after all.

7. Turn the tables – 5 mins

We get more out of user interview sessions when we turn them in to a two-way conversation. Before the session winds down, give your user a chance to ask questions of you. There’s something else they might want to tell you, or have questions about the service or even your approach. You might ask “Do you have any questions for us, or is there anything else you’d like to tell us?”.

8. Wrap it up – 2 mins

Thank the user for their time and reiterate how they will receive their incentive.

9. Team debrief – 15 mins

After you’ve parted ways with the user(s), gather your team for a quick huddle. Ask what they thought about the user’s feedback: was it useful? Surprising? Contradictory? The goal of the debrief is to discuss the key takeaways and help the information to sink in. Document the key takeaways so you won’t forget them.

After all your user interviews are complete you need to synthesise all of that qualitative data you just collected. Some of the plays can help you synthesise your data are:

• Grouping
• Customer journey mapping

See below for a collection of templates and other pages which will help you run this play.

These resources are also linked in the play instructions.

• Notetaking template
• User interviews guide
• Participant interview consent form
• User interview screener

Subject:

Can you assist with a customer interview for [project name]?

Meeting description:

Hi [team name if sending a group invitation, or participant name if sending individual invitations]

As part of our work on [name of project], we’re looking to conduct some user interviews as part of the project

Are you available to be a scribe or observer for this project? The sessions will take about [x] minutes and there is no preparation required. The interviews will be conducted on [date(s) of interview] [in person/online via Teams/other platform]. Please let me know by [date] what interviews you will be available for.

If you would like some further insight into the activity, you can read more in the user interview play as part of the digital service design playbook"

Kind Regards,

[Facilitator name]