Customer Interviews

Emmett Shear, CEO, Twitch

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, Editorial Team, Atlassian

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.

Tien Anh Nguyen, CFO, UserTesting

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).

Tomer Sharon, Head of User Research & Metrics, Goldman Sachs

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.

Nikki Anderson, Senior User Researcher, fromAtoB

Nikkie provides a 9-step process to recruit users for interviews from your mailing list.

Michael Margolis, UX Research Partner, GV

Michael digs into how to behave during interviews (be open-minded, smile, be fascinated, avoid generalizations, listen intently) and how to deeply explore topics.

Teresa Torres, VP, Product, AfterCollege

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.

Erika Hall, Co-founder, Mule Design Studio

Erika outlines how to effectively interview users to learn about everything that might influence how the users might use what you're creating.

Teresa Torres, VP, Product, AfterCollege

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.

Ryan Singer, Head Of Strategy, Basecamp

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.

John Cutler, Senior Product Manager, Zendesk

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.

Nikki Anderson, Senior User Researcher, fromAtoB

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.

Sherif Mansour, Distinguished Product Manager, Atlassian

Sherif explains the layers of communicating research results: communicate observations, interpret problems, and connect opportunities.