# User Interview

> A structured conversation with someone who uses or might use a product, aimed at understanding their situation rather than collecting opinions.

- Category: Process & Methods
- Canonical: https://www.themasterly.com/glossary/user-interview

A user interview is a structured conversation aimed at understanding somebody's situation: what they are trying to accomplish, how they do it now, and what gets in the way. It is the most flexible research method available and the easiest to do badly, because a bad interview still produces a transcript full of quotes.

It is distinct from its neighbours. A [usability test](https://www.themasterly.com/glossary/usability-testing) watches somebody attempt a task and reports where they fail. An interview asks about their world, and the answers describe things you cannot observe: what happened before they opened the product, what they do afterwards, and why they were doing it at all.

## The questions that work

**Ask about the past.** "How did you handle the last month-end close?" returns an account of a real event, with the awkward parts still in it. "Would you use a feature that automated it?" returns a prediction, and predictions about one's own future behaviour are close to worthless.

**Ask for the specific instance.** "Tell me about the last time this went wrong" produces detail. "What usually happens?" produces a summary that has been tidied in the telling.

**Ask what they did, not what they think.** Behaviour is checkable; opinion is polite.

**Follow the effort.** When somebody mentions a workaround, a spreadsheet, or asking a colleague, stop and follow it. Workarounds are the clearest statement of an unmet need anybody will ever give you, and they get mentioned in passing.

**Never describe your solution first.** Once an interviewee knows what you hope to hear, they will help you hear it. If you must show a concept, do it at the end.

## The technique that matters most is silence

The strongest single habit is waiting. Three seconds after somebody appears to have finished is where the qualified, honest, more interesting version of the answer arrives.

The instinct to fill that gap — with a follow-up, with agreement, with the next question — is what most separates useful interviews from transcripts of pleasant conversations. The second strongest habit is asking "and then what did you do?", repeatedly, until the story runs out.

## Recruiting, which is the hard part in B2B

The method is cheap. The participants are not, and this is where most B2B research programmes quietly stop.

**Screen for behaviour, not job title.** "Someone who added a teammate in the last month" produces a useful conversation. "A product manager at a mid-sized company" produces somebody who may never have done the thing you want to discuss.

**Ask customer success for a behaviour, not a favour.** A general request for willing customers returns your happiest ones, which biases everything toward accounts that already succeed.

**Prioritise recent switchers and churned accounts.** They hold the most information and are the hardest to reach, which is precisely why most teams never hear from them. See [jobs to be done](https://www.themasterly.com/glossary/jobs-to-be-done).

**Use internal proxies carefully.** Support agents and implementation staff share the workflow without the product knowledge and are available. They are a proxy, and the write-up should say so.

## Turning interviews into something usable

**Separate observation from interpretation.** "Four of six kept a parallel spreadsheet" is an observation. "We need an export feature" is a proposal, and somebody may have a better one. Mixing them makes the observation arguable.

**Quote, do not paraphrase.** A participant's own words carry information your summary removes, and they survive being challenged in a meeting.

**Look for the same thing said differently.** Patterns rarely repeat in the same vocabulary, which is why a tidy tally of phrases misses them.

**Record what surprised you.** The moment your assumption broke is the most valuable thing in the session and the first thing to fade.

## Interviews against the alternatives

Interviews get used for questions other methods answer better, which is what makes them feel unreliable.

| Question | Method |
|---|---|
| What are people trying to do, and why | Interview |
| Where does this design fail | [Usability testing](https://www.themasterly.com/glossary/usability-testing) |
| How often does that happen | Product analytics |
| Which of two versions performs better | [A/B testing](https://www.themasterly.com/glossary/ab-testing) |
| Can people find things in this structure | [Tree testing](https://www.themasterly.com/glossary/tree-testing) |
| How do people group our content | [Card sorting](https://www.themasterly.com/glossary/card-sorting) |

The pairing that does the most work is interviews plus analytics. Analytics has complete coverage and no explanation; interviews have explanation and no coverage. Either alone produces confident work aimed at the wrong thing, which is the failure both are blamed for.

## In practice

A team runs six interviews about a reporting feature, asking what reports customers need.

The answers are a list of report types, and the roadmap almost becomes that list. What rescues it is one question asked late in the fourth interview: what do you do with the report once you have it?

Every participant does the same thing. They export it, paste it into a slide, and add a sentence explaining what changed. Nobody had mentioned this, because nobody was asked, and because the slide is not part of the product and therefore not on their mind when discussing it.

The finding reframes the work. The job is not producing reports; it is arriving at a meeting able to say what changed and why. That is a different feature, and it did not appear on any request list.

## Where teams get it wrong

- **Asking about the future.** Stated intent is a weak predictor of behaviour.
- **Describing the solution first.** The interviewee starts helping you.
- **Filling silences.** The best answer arrives in the pause you interrupted.
- **Talking only to happy customers.** The easiest people to reach and the least informative.
- **Treating requests as specifications.** People request what they can imagine; the job is behind it.
- **One interview per role and a conclusion.** Six is where patterns start being visible.

## Related terms

- [User Research](https://www.themasterly.com/glossary/user-research)
- [Usability Testing](https://www.themasterly.com/glossary/usability-testing)
- [Jobs To Be Done](https://www.themasterly.com/glossary/jobs-to-be-done)
- [User Persona](https://www.themasterly.com/glossary/user-persona)

## FAQ

**What is a user interview?**

A structured conversation aimed at understanding somebody's situation, what they are trying to do and what currently stops them. It is not a usability test, which watches somebody attempt a task, and it is not a survey, which asks many people a fixed set of questions.

**How many user interviews are enough?**

Six to eight per distinct group is usually where patterns become visible, and the signal that you have enough is hearing what you have already heard. B2B products with several roles need that number per role, so ten to twenty in total is common rather than excessive.

**What questions should you ask in a user interview?**

Questions about the past and about specifics. "Tell me about the last time you did a month-end close" produces an account of something that happened. "What would you like in a reporting tool" produces a prediction, and people are unreliable predictors of their own behaviour.

**How do you avoid leading the interview?**

Never describe your solution before asking about the problem, ask what happened rather than what they think, and let silence do the work. The most useful follow-up in any interview is saying nothing for three seconds, and the second most useful is asking what they did next.

**Should you ask users what they want?**

Ask what they do, and treat what they want as a clue rather than a specification. People request solutions they can already imagine, which is why feature requests cluster around things that exist. The underlying job is what you are listening for, and it is usually behind the request rather than in it.

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