UX Research Tips: Questions to Ask in a User Research Interview | Sarah Doody, UX Designer

are you a user experience designer or a product manager who's maybe convinced your boss that it's time to start talking to your users but you don't know what you should ask your users well in this video I'm going to give you specific examples of questions you can ask during a user research interview or a usability test but first a little bit more about me my name is Sarah dudy and I'm I'm a user experience designer and entrepreneur based in New York City and these episodes are filled with honest answers and insights to your questions about design technology and business and if you want to learn more about user experience you can get my weekly user experience newsletter called The ux Notebook just get it at the ux notebook.com and you'll get your first issue on Friday but back to that question of what questions do I ask in a user research interview or usability test so I get asked this a lot people say okay I've convinced my boss we need to do research and now I don't have a clue what to do or what questions to ask so let's assume that you are going to do an interview and maybe this product is in Market or maybe it's brand new maybe it's a new feature for your existing product but the way that I like to structure interview questions is first of all I always go into an interview with a discussion guide or a script now this guide is a set of questions that we intend to ask and get answers to because of the nature of how interviews work though you cannot expect that you will get to cover all of the questions on your list because what happens is when you're asking someone the question you'll end up asking them follow-up questions you'll say oh well why did you do that or how did that work out or was that what you expected to happen so as you can see if you have a question list of 30 questions you might only get to ask 15 of them so you have to reiterate that your discussion guide or script is just that it's a guide it's not a guarantee that you're going to ask all these questions so I'm just going to look down at my little list of questions here because I don't want to miss anything so I like to structure the interviews um in this way I like to do a little bit of an intro section A little bit of a section where we get to know maybe their technology habits and then and their lifestyle and then I like to dive into kind of the meat and potatoes of the actual interview so the first section of the interview is what I would call customer intro questions and these are just questions to kind of be ice breakers to get to know the person so we might say hey tell me what your typical day looks like what's a day in the life and then they'll tell you maybe about their job their family their Hobbies Etc um maybe I might want to use this time to get to know a little bit about their relationship with technology so I might say okay on an average day you know when do you first start using technology and then they might say well well I actually check my phone in bed because it's my alarm clock so I'm laying there and I just I get on my phone as soon as I wake up you'll probably hear that because I hear that and I would say 99% of the interviews I do but so Day in the Life technology habits um maybe ask them about their role at their company you know what's your job how did you get into this just Icebreaker questions really are good then we start to get into some topics I specific questions so let's say we are doing an interview related to a fitness product so this is the time when we've broken the ice got to know the person a little bit about their life now we want to go dive deeper into the topic of running and fitness so we might say something like hey can you tell me you know what's your what's your workout routine how often do you work out and they will then tell us maybe how often they work out what times of exercises they do do they do group fitness do they do running do they belong to a gym do they not belong to a gym they may bring this up all on their own or those me might be follow-up topics that you um ask them so let's imagine that we're interviewing for a product that has to do with um training for running race let's say helping people train for their first 5k so other questions we might ask would be you know have you ever trained for a race before and let's assume they say yes then we could say things like how did you go about coming up with a schedule for that then they'll tell us oh I used an app or I went to this website or my friend gave it to me um tell me about the last race you trained for it's another way of kind of asking the same question but having them recount the story of what they did so tell me about the last time you blank is a really great question because it gets the people telling the real life stories of whatever the topic is so the real life story of how they trained for that 5K how they planned that vacation how they purchased the vacuum tell me about the last time you that's one I always ask um what was the biggest problem in that process what was the hardest part about buying that vacuum what was the hardest part about booking that plane ticket then again they'll start to tell you all those stories other questions to you could ask around the topic um did you have to come up with any workarounds for this so did you have to tweak the running schedule did you have to make an Excel sheet or something they will tell you their alternative Solutions which is really interesting for you as the researcher because you want to know what problem they had and if they made alternative Solutions because if they made alternative Solutions that's a strong indicator that they would might be looking for a new solution or at least open to one and bonus if they would pay us for that um other questions um what other products or tools have you used to do X they might mention competitor apps websites Facebook groups other resources that you may not have known about have you paid for any of these tools how did you hear about them um let's move on to the next section just in the interest of time so next we might move on to what I would call product opportunity questions so let's say we then had a demo or a little prototype of a product that we um had made around training for a 5k so we might bring it up on the screen and let's say we go to the homepage um we might say something like hey this is a prototype we made and we just want you to take a look at this first screen maybe scroll up and down a little bit and just give us your general impressions of this what do you think it is what's kind of what task can it help you do um how's it going to help you in your running training and then we close our mouths and we listen to what they say so as I scroll up and down the page they'll probably kind of narrate cuz hopefully we're asking them to talk aloud and tell us what's going through their head so what do you think of this product what do you think of this homepage then we move on to things like why do you think someone would use this product what type of person is this product aimed at based on this homepage could you see yourself ever using this product anyone you know um why do you think you could trust this product now this might not be as relevant to say a an app to help you train for a 5k but let's say it was related to finance how would you know you can trust this product or this website how do you think this product or website's going to help you what would you use this product today what would you do what would you hope to get out of it these are all questions that can kind of help us evaluate that prototype a homepage the um the product that we are showing them assuming we have something to show next we run into these what I would say product reaction questions so again these could be questions that we are asking for a prototype or sometimes if I don't have a prototype ready I will go to a competitor's website and ask these same questions so what is most appealing about this product if it's a competitor product what's most appealing why do you like it why do you stick with it what's the hardest part about it was there anything surprising or unexpected in this product or if you're walking them through your product you know was there anything surprising when you purchased that item booked that flight completed that task was there anything missing was there things that you expected to happen that didn't happen and would you keep using this this product after you saw it today great questions to just get people's gut gut reactions so I know those are a ton of questions and there are a lot more you could ask but I wanted to give you that kind of high level summary we ask These intro questions to break the ice then we dive into the topic then if we have a prototype or a competitor product we can show then we dive into those um product opportunity and product reaction questions so that's how I generally structure an interview user research interview now I know that was a lot so we have all these questions in a download for you we'll link to it um below but also you can just go to sarad duty.com research questions and that's the short link to get this PDF with 35 questions that you can ask and some tips as well so if you are getting ready to do user research interviews or usability tests or you've done them in the past you'll probably still learn a lot from this so thanks for watching hope this helps you guys and if you want to learn more about user experience just get my weekly user experience newsletter just go to theux notebook.com and you'll get ux tips articles videos dropped in your inbox every Friday I curate the whole thing so um if you like this you'll probably like that newsletter as well thanks guys and I will talk to you soon see you later

Channel: Sarah Doody

Views: 68,240

Keywords: user experience designer, sarah doody, sarah doody user experience, sarah doody ux, what is a user experience designer, usability, user testing, doing user research, conducting user research, how to do user research, how to do user testing, how to do usability testing, ux research tips, questions for ux research interview, user research interview questions, user research interview, user research interview example, user research plan, conducting user research interviews

Id: auQCdrRfYas

Length: 11min 43sec (703 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 23 2017