What are the most effective tools for user interviews in product design?

1 Planning tools

Before you start interviewing your users, it is important to have a clear goal, target audience, recruitment strategy, and script. Planning tools can help you organize and streamline these steps with a consistent and reliable approach. UserInterviews is a platform that assists you in finding and scheduling participants for your user interviews, surveys, and tests. You can select from their pool of over 200,000 users or use your own contacts. This tool also allows you to set up screening questions, incentives, reminders, and cancellations. Dovetail is another tool that helps create and share research plans, interview guides, and consent forms. You can collaborate with your team and stakeholders on these plans as well as get feedback and approval.

2 Recording tools

During your user interviews, it is essential to capture what your users say and do, as well as their emotions and reactions. Recording tools can be used to collect and store audio, video, and screen data from your interviews, making them accessible and searchable. Zoom is a video conferencing tool that allows you to conduct remote user interviews and record them in the cloud or on your device. It also enables you to share your screen, use annotations, and chat with your participants. Loom is another useful tool that lets you record your screen, voice, and face to create shareable videos. It can be used for both recording user interviews and explaining findings and insights to your team and stakeholders.

3 Analysis tools

After your user interviews, you need to analyze the data collected and extract meaningful insights and patterns. Analysis tools such as Otter and Reframer can be used to transcribe audio and video recordings into text, generate summaries and keywords, code and tag qualitative data, create affinity diagrams and insights, collaborate with team members, and share findings and recommendations. Additionally, Otter allows you to edit, annotate, export transcripts, and sync them with recordings.

4 Sharing tools

Finally, you need to communicate and present your user interview findings and insights to your team and stakeholders, aligning them with your product goals and strategy. To do this, you can use sharing tools like Miro and Storyteller. Miro allows you to create interactive boards where you can visualize and organize your user interview data, insights, and ideas. You can also invite your team and stakeholders to collaborate, comment, and vote on your boards. Storyteller helps you create stories from your user research and connect them with your product vision and roadmap. You can even embed these stories into existing tools like Slack, Jira, and Confluence. Sharing tools are a great way to create engaging reports that will inform stakeholders and elicit valuable feedback.