Customer/User Interview

Hey all. Recently I was engaged in a challenging assignment: Customer/User Interview. Simply put, customer/user interview is to talk to your customer/user before building the product so that whatever you build meets their needs, solves their pain points, and adds value to them.

While I was working on the customer interview, I recalled my past engagements in some organisations that they build many products internally for their employees, but there was no user interview; at least not a correct one. Before I go to more detail, just want to highlight that please do interview your users even for internal company products; you'll be surprised from the outcome and the gap between what you think and what they want!

Let's see in high level what needs to be done in a typical customer/user interview:

The customer/user interview has two main parts i.e. you need to ask 2 set of questions from your users: 1) Customer discovery questions, 2) Usability questions.

Customer discovery is basically about finding out (i.e. discover) what your users are doing. These are mainly 5WHow questions. What we want to learn at this step: What are users’ behaviors, attitudes and expectations towards our product? What are their needs? What are pros/cons of competitors' products? How are people using existing/competitors' product? What features are most important? What barriers hinder users from adopting our product?

Usability questions: In this part, the best approach is to demo your product; something like a prototype and ask the user to click here and there and give you feedback. What we want to learn in this part is whether the features and functions of the product is "Usable" or not: What do you like and dislike about this product? If you had 3 wishes to make this better for you, what would they be? Why? How would you describe this product to a friend? Under what circumstances/conditions would you use this product? Why?

Go thru the video from Michael Margolis in GV, he's expert in this field: