How can you conduct effective user interviews for mobile-first content research?

1 Define your goals

Before you start interviewing your users, you need to have a clear idea of what you want to learn from them. What are the main questions you want to answer? What are the assumptions you want to validate or invalidate? What are the pain points or opportunities you want to explore? Having specific and measurable goals will help you design your interview questions, select your participants, and analyze your findings.

3 Prepare your questions

Your questions should be open-ended, neutral, and relevant to your goals. You want to avoid leading, biased, or vague questions that may influence or confuse your users. You also want to avoid asking too many or too few questions that may overwhelm or bore your users. A good rule of thumb is to have around 10-15 questions that cover the main topics you want to explore, such as user needs, content preferences, content consumption, content feedback, and content suggestions.

4 Recruit your participants

Your participants should be representative of your target audience, meaning they should have the characteristics, behaviors, and goals that match your user personas. You can recruit your participants from various sources, such as your existing customers, social media followers, online communities, or third-party platforms. You should aim to have at least 5-10 participants per user segment, depending on the complexity and diversity of your audience. You should also offer some incentives, such as gift cards, discounts, or free trials, to encourage participation and appreciation.

5 Conduct your interviews

When you conduct your interviews, you should follow some best practices to ensure a smooth and productive session. You should introduce yourself and the purpose of the interview, obtain consent and permission to record or share the screen, establish rapport and trust with your users, ask your questions in a logical and conversational order, probe for more details and examples, avoid interrupting or judging your users, thank them and ask for feedback at the end, and document and summarize your notes and observations.

6 Analyze your findings

After you conduct your interviews, you should analyze your findings and extract meaningful insights that can inform your content strategy. You should review your recordings, notes, and transcripts, and look for common themes, patterns, and insights that answer your goals. You should also look for any surprises, contradictions, or gaps that challenge your assumptions or reveal new opportunities. You should organize and visualize your findings in a way that makes sense to you and your stakeholders, such as using affinity diagrams, personas, journey maps, or reports.

7 Here’s what else to consider

This is a space to share examples, stories, or insights that don’t fit into any of the previous sections. What else would you like to add?