As a UX designer, your job is to focus on the user's experience, but in the beginning stages your goal is to conduct research.

This research is focused on finding the needs for the platform you’re working on and more importantly learning about the potential users for the platform.

User interviews can be tricky and believe it or not there is a science to it.

For one, you’ll need to get into form. Which means you can’t have any opinion on the product you’re working on, you have to have a neutral point of view. Doing this allows you to get the most out of each question since you’re not leading the interviewee down a specific path that you want them to go down.

For example, you don’t want to ask a potential user of your platform this question,

Do you like what “platform name” is offering?

You might like or not like the product you’re working on but if you answer this question you’re restricting the interviewee from expressing their true opinion.

Most humans don’t want to hurt anyone's feelings, so with this question you’re probably going to get “yes” as an answer most of the time which isn’t the research you’re looking for.

If you tackle this from a neutral standpoint the question should look like this.

What would motivate you to use “platform name”?

This question allows the interviewee to think about it from there perspective and that’s the answer you want to capture.