Customer Interviews
Introduction to Customer Interviews
- How to Run a User Interview
In this video from YC's Startup School, Emmett workshops a live user interview for a notetaking app and interprets actual user interview content from Twitch.
- Atlassian's Customer Interview Process
This article gets hands-on about how to structure a 60-minute interview with housekeeping, warm-up questions, meaty questions, observer questions, turning the tables, and wrap-up.
- What They Really Think About You: How to Structure and Conduct Customer Interviews
Tien goes over a perspective on interview structure and conduct that is geared more toward learning about prospective buyer journeys, as opposed to active customers of a product (like the Atlassian article).
How to Find Participants to Interview
- 43 ways to find participants for research
This article is a one-step shop for learning how to recruit interviewees (prospects or customers). The author solicited ideas and learnings from 23 product and research experts.
- My step-by-step user recruitment process
Nikkie provides a 9-step process to recruit users for interviews from your mailing list.
How to Conduct Yourself
- Get better data from user studies: 16 interviewing tips
Michael digs into how to behave during interviews (be open-minded, smile, be fascinated, avoid generalizations, listen intently) and how to deeply explore topics.
- How To Develop Your Active Listening Skills
Teresa concretely explains how to listen actively: practice empathy, note the affect / emotion, pay attention to non-verbal cues, and repeat back what you heard.
- Interviewing Humans
Erika outlines how to effectively interview users to learn about everything that might influence how the users might use what you're creating.
What to Ask
- Ask About the Past Rather Than the Future
Teresa explains why asking questions about the future (e.g. "would you use or buy this product") usually don't work, because what we say differs from what we do. Instead, asking about what actually happened in the past can reveal problems that we can solve in the future.
- Keep digging
Ryan describes how to get deep into the chain of cause and effect in a customer's behavior by continuously digging into past behavior with different questions and different wording.
- 50 Interview Questions For B2B SaaS Customer Research
John has come up with a terrific set of clever questions. We recommend using this list as a refresher next time you're doing doing a B2B research interview to see if any of the questions are appropriate for your use case.
Post-Interview Analysis & Communication
- How to assess your research interviews
Nikki provides a checklist for how to listen to a recorded interview and rate how well it went, in service of continuously improving your interviewing quality.
- The Customer Interview Pyramid
Sherif explains the layers of communicating research results: communicate observations, interpret problems, and connect opportunities.