The Interview

Up until 10 minutes before the interview, I started to get really nervous. To make things even worse when I jumped on the call it was only me and the potential user, we were still waiting on the business development rep to jump on so we could start the interview.

The best thing to do in these situations is to create “small talk”.

I asked how the user was doing and what they were up to today. We shared some laughs and before I knew it the meeting officially started.

After our rep explained what the app does and the goal we’re trying to achieve with it, it was my turn to start asking questions. By the way, make sure you or someone on your team is communicating to this potential user what your product does and the problem it solves.

I read some articles online focusing on user interviews and they all informed me to always let the user talk. The more they’re talking the more data we’re collecting.

Luckily the person I was interviewing talked a lot. After the first question or so the business development rep would ping me on slack asking me to ask the user to “dive deeper” into their answer.

The goal of doing this is to get the potential user to open up more.

I usually asked the potential user to dive deeper into the questions involving our competitors or roadblocks they’ve faced when trying to solve “x” problem.

Overall the meeting went well, I tried to make the potential user feel as comfortable as I could. The more comfortable your potential user is the better answers you’re going to be able to record.

If I had to do it over, I would do one thing differently.

Throughout the interview, the user would pause sometimes to think/reflect. I HATE SILENCE, so I decided to break the silence with a question.

During my debrief with my team, they encouraged me to not do that and to let the user reflect/think. Most of the time when there is a moment of silence the user will break it and start adding more to their previous answer.

Remember, the more the user is talking the more data you’re collecting.

Other than that I did pretty well and from looking at the notes we recorded our team got a lot of valuable insight that we needed.