User Interview Questions

A quick guide (and helpful chart) for writing user interview questions.

people asking questions

Writing questions for a user interview shouldn't be hard. In theory, the purpose of these interviews is for two precise things: Getting a user persona and finding out in-depth information about the user's wants, needs, and opinions about your current or future product.

To do this you need to follow this simple process:

1. Figure out what you want to know.

List these things in priority. Base your questions off of what you wrote down. Branch off these questions for more in-depth or more out-of-the-box interview questions as well.

2. Find Users to Interview and Schedule Interview Times.

I like to schedule anywhere from an hour to an hour and a half per interview. Keep in mind that interviews are not usually done in front of the product. If you are asking a user to complete a task in your product during this interview, that is a user test. That is not the purpose of a user interview. A lot of users like an incentive to spend their time with you. If their boss is not telling them that they have to do it, offer a gift card or cash for taking time out of their day to help. (If you do offer a gift, make sure you get it approved by your company first.)

3. Write Your Questions

We will be going over how to do this later on in the article.👇

4. Interview Your Users

Some tricks and tips on how to interview users successfully can be found in the last few paragraphs of this article.👇

5. Collect and Present Your Findings

This is very important. Everything you did up to this point could be completely useless if you do not present your findings well. Make sure all the time you spent writing your questions, interviewing your users, and collecting the data is not in vain. Make the data easy to digest with quick facts, key quotes, and infographics. If they want all the data after the initial summary report, then send them the full document of the work. This document should have the top 10 key facts, consistent feedback found, and the word…