User interviews are an indispensable activity in the research phase of any mobile app project. When designing an app, it’s easy to make design decisions based on one specific persona or usage scenario, only to discover later that other user types have been left out. It’s important to always remember that apps can be used in a variety of contexts and by different users.
Interviewing users provides you with rich insights into what they really need from your app. It helps ensure that you build something that will add value for your audience.
The purpose of conducting interviews is not just to get users’ feedback, but also to discover needs and problems that you might not have been aware of. Simply put, the goal is to collect as much information about your potential customers as possible. This new information will enable you to make an informed decision about what direction to take your app in.
What happens if I don’t conduct interviews?
User interviews aren’t always necessary, but if for some reason they aren’t included in your project plan, consider the consequence: you might end up with an awesome app that nobody uses.
By conducting a few interviews, you’ll quickly find out if there is actual market demand for your idea and if people are willing to pay money to use it. This will be extremely valuable information when talking about monetization strategies or preparing financial projections.
Interviews don’t require much effort; the most difficult part is often determining who and how many potential users to interview. However, they can significantly impact the success of your product. If interviews reveal that there is no interest in the product whatsoever, then maybe think about revising the idea or passing the project to another team.
How do I conduct user interviews?
For user interviews to work, the information collected must be quantitative and objective. This means it’s more important to know facts such as “How often does a user do X?”, rather than just opinions such as “Users really love X!”.
There are three steps involved in conducting a user interview:
- Preparation for the interview
Being prepared for an interview will help you conduct it better. It is common to prepare the following things before conducting a user interview:
Questions about your product need that are clearly defined. This makes the whole process less time consuming and helps get quick feedback from users that goes into depth about their experience with your product/app.
Scenarios to give context for certain questions and give the interviewee something they can easily relate to when answering questions. For example, if you wanted feedback on your app’s website, instead of asking “How would you rate our website?”, ask the person what their favorite websites are and how yours compares.
- Conducting the interview
There are various tools to help you conduct user interviews:
- Surveys/questionnaires
- Diaries/journaling
- Online interviews
- Focus groups
User interviews can be conducted in person, over the phone or via video call. If personal interaction isn’t possible, this doesn’t mean that your research will be less effective. When conducting an interview online, try to find out as much as you can about potential users such as:
- What does your target person do for a living?
- How old is he or she?
- Where does this person live?
Just as in traditional interviews, try to avoid leading questions and instead ask open-ended ones so that the interviewee can provide as many relevant answers as possible. Asking things such as “Do you like our product?” will only provoke a yes or no answer but won’t provide any valuable information.
It’s important that throughout the interview, you try to collect quantitative data such as frequency of usage. The last thing you want is people saying out loud how great your app is if they never actually open it! Here are some tools you can present to users that will help them answer effectively:
- Visuals
- Mock-ups
- Sketches/wireframes
- Prototypes
Interviews where you have a prepared questionnaire are great for simpler, straightforward research. Questions should be simple and easy to answer. Most of the time, these interviews will take place over the phone or via Skype. When answering questions, users will remain anonymous, but try not to make them feel uncomfortable by asking them to reveal too many personal details. While conducting user interviews with prepared questionnaires, it’s important to keep in mind that the answers given must be qualitative and objective and don’t forget to take notes during the interview.
In-person interviews are conducted in person and will allow you to ask people questions that go into depth about how they use a product, but they can be costly and inconvenient for interviewees.
- Analyzing results after the interview
Once you have all findings from interviews, present them in a simple report. This will ensure that everyone working on the project is aware of results and agrees with decisions made.
After an interview is complete, it needs to be analyzed so that findings can be given out as feedback to the development team/other people involved.
Directly after the interview has been conducted, you should write down all the feedback that users provided. You can then sort through this to find patterns that illustrate user needs. Write these findings in a report and include them in your project documentation. This is the most effective analysis technique because it allows you to refer to what users said throughout the process of designing and developing your app. It’s also possible for other people who weren’t present during an interview to learn from it as well. Interviewing various types of individuals will help you get a better idea of how people use apps in general so that future designs are more versatile, which means there are fewer roadblocks when passing on your findings to the development team.
Conclusion
Assumptions made prior to product development can result in product failure, so it’s important to gauge how users feel about your product.
User interviews are a simple and cost-effective technique for eliciting user feedback on a particular idea, prototype, or product. As an entrepreneur, you should always seek the user’s perspective on your work, and interviews can be the simplest way to do so. When you understand how the user feels and thinks, you can design a solution that provides the best possible user experience.