Creating your first UX Interview for beginners

The below guideline is a How-to guide to "Creating your first UX Interview for beginners"

If you are new to the role of Product Management or beginning a career in User Research, Getting started can be overwhelming, one of the things I like to do as an activity to get settled and started in my role is to talk to the user. To create your first UX interview, it's a good idea to get started with a 1-pager to help you navigate your objective and research goals to your stakeholders and your participants.

This has worked for me, when I enter a new organisation to work as a Head of Product, is not only to understand the User Persona but to talk to the customer.

01

Describe your Objective & Research Goal

Here are two examples for you, to see how I've written and described my objective.

Objective: To clearly understand our different target audiences, to receive honest first-hand feedback on our current offering, and to understand their unfulfilled needs.

Research Goals: To learn more about our Sarah the Mom, her motivations behind receiving financial advice online vs offline.

02

List the key points to be clarified in your study or focus group

Next list the key points that you need to do, use the jobs-to-be-done framework to pinpoint your criteria.

Example criteria

• Motivation of users

• Identify differences between user segments

• Inspection of Intent

• Inspection or investigation of habits (eg; Device usage, mobile, tablet, desktop/laptop)

• Inspection of external factors (eg; data plans, accessibility to the internet, wifi, etc)

• Pain points of users

03

Keep budgets/resources in check with outlining your intended study size, make sure that these are specific users, something too broad isn't going to give you the feedback you may need.

Intended Group size: 3 groups at 10 participants each

• Group a) List [Demographics], [habits], [current user]

• Group b) List [Demographics], [habits], [first time user]

• Group c) List [Demographics], [habits], [non-user]

04

When working in a team of interviewers, provide guidelines

To establish the rules of the study, it's best to agree with the guidelines of the study eg;

Recruited users are to participate in 1.5-hour sessions, over [date to date], at [times]

• Permission of Study requires discussions need to be recorded & disclosed to the company

• Face-to-Face interviews are a hard requirement or not

• Users will be contacted directly within the existing network. To get meaningful feedback, it needs to be ensured that open and frank users are selected

05

Agree on a Research Goal, it's project deliverable & deadline list before you start

Work together with your management team, to clarify the deliverables, intended outcomes, and budget of your user study.

• Communicate your Research Goal to your stakeholders

• Set aside a date and duration of the interviews

• Tell your stakeholders how many participants you need

• Ensure you have suggestions for incentives for the participants if you are self-recruiting

• Get a schedule together of when you would be able to summarize, present your findings to your stakeholders.

06

Create your submission format

Standard submissions of the material include raw data, contact lists, and other related materials, here is one that I include in each project I've worked with;

• List of Participants with address, telephone number, job title, company, relationship to or Titles, income range (excel)

• Video Mpeg 4 or AVI format, of all recordings unedited and raw footage only

• Questions in English

• Transcript in Thai / Translation in English

• Summary of outcomes

07

Create your UX interview agenda for your participants

This is the itinerary of the session, what to expect and disclaimer notices given to users about recordings, and the structured materials/topics that you will be discussing with the user.

Create your interview agenda for your particpants

08

Create the User Interview script

Or putting your user persona front and center you can also structure your questions like this;

the focus is to extract as much information as possible to determine the habits of the user and discover what really motivates them and what experiences do they have, whether your product or idea interests and delights them.

Make sure you don't ask leading questions.

Example Scripts for User Interviews

Happy research leads to happy customers. My how-to guide on starting your project could be useful for to begin How to start your MVP, with user research from your desk

By Sarah Huang, Consultant