Basic 3 questions for user interviews

The first step in the design process for the User Center is user research . It is an ideal way to understand users and match their goals and needs to your business objectives. But generally speaking, communicating with users requires skill. Who knows what to do in the end if Chowa ask the user what you want and do the iphone as needed. So, take a look at this article, whether you do with research or design, you should be able to get a lot of benefits.

The first principle of user research: Don't ask users what they want directly

--erika Hall,just Enough

I like to do user interviews, they are inexpensive, effective (you get more information than you ask), and fast (General interview 5 users are enough). However, quality user interviews require skill. If you are naturally sensitive and curious about the crowd, it can help you get the information you want, and if you don't have that trait, it can also help you to feel the character. For example, Michael Margolis of Google Labs likes to bring himself into the role of user research.

As Erika Hall said, when you do user interviews, avoid asking them what they want, because it only gives you the wrong idea. You can only reap the solution to the problem that the user has envisioned, but you cannot discover the nature of the problem.

Don't set up roadblocks to your user interviews

Just asking what the user wants makes the interview more difficult, and you can only get the wrong idea.

When you ask the user what you want, you are actually asking him to think about all the possibilities of solving the problem, which will undoubtedly make user research more difficult. If you're doing user research to build a new product or feature that doesn't exist, you want to know what causes users to use existing tools to get the job done, and follow this method to design new features or incrementally optimize existing features to help them accomplish their tasks.

When I was working at Kissmetrics, I spent a lot of time communicating with users about what tools or methods they were using to solve the problems they were experiencing. I've summed up three efficient and useful questions for user interviews, and have tried to:

What problems are you working out? (Collect content information)

How do you solve the problem at the moment? (Analysis Workflow)

Is there any way to help you do better (discover opportunities)

Translator Note: Kissmetrics data analysis Company, located in San Francisco

Question 1: What are you trying to solve, and why should you solve the problem?

In order to exploit the root cause of product usage and problems, we constantly ask the user "Why do it" until we really understand the pain point of the user or customer.

When you investigate what users are doing, it is critical to gather background information that will help you understand your users. Research to collect information such as how many people work in groups and how they are working together in a large organization will help us set the scope of the research issues to make our products more effective in this framework

Imagine that you are a craftsman, don't you want to know if your current task is to mend a crack in the wall, or to repair the whole room? Depending on your task, you will need to choose a different tool and a corresponding model.

The same applies to user interviews. Your PM and RD team will appreciate it when you know what the user is working on and tell the necessary information to your research team. To explore the root cause of the problem, ask why. Using the 5-step "Why" method of asking can make research easier. By repeatedly asking why (not really only 5 or so, as the case may be), you will naturally be aware of the user's workflow, or find out what the necessary processes are missing. Using this method, I can improve the process to meet the needs of users, without requiring engineers to develop a new function to make up for, so that engineers can be freed from inefficient projects.

Question 2: How do you solve the problem at the moment?

Figuring out the workflow and organizational structure can help us determine where to start to solve the problem.

After clarifying the scope of the problem, I tend to find out how the user is dealing with the problem at the moment. The advantage of doing this is that I can follow their footsteps and see how painful they are when dealing with the problem. Sometimes, users use exotic methods to solve problems and get what they want. But in fact, we just need to improve the product to solve the problem that users spend hours or even a week solving.

Give me a chestnut. I recently investigated a product team for new features they are planning to develop. But we want to know how serious the problem is at the moment, and then prioritize it. By interviewing a series of users who are currently operating, I have the following conclusions:

The process expresses how the customer manages the mailing list and how to evaluate the source; CTA Full name Commodity trading advisors, commodity trading consultant; Webinar is an online conferencing software

Knowing the user's workflow also allows your team to find out which part of your workflow needs to be optimized. Another chestnut, in Kissmetrics, we recently found that customers prefer to use mail rather than Third-party apps when checking data. We already know that Kissmetrics is an integral part of their daily work, and some users will even process the data first when they arrive at the office, so we are currently upgrading the project to send a clearer summary of our customers ' emails every day.

Question 3: Is there a way to help you do better?

Most of the research is over before you think about it. The problem is to get users to give you some hints on which areas they need help most. Of course, this issue can also help you to identify or overturn some of your team's assumptions about the product architecture.

If you start by crossing previous questions to ask users how they can do better, you can only get some of their opinions but not know how they are dealing with the problems they are experiencing right now.

"It's a very difficult thing to design a product, and most of the time, it's only after the product is available that people know what they want." "-steve Jobs

This is where you find the opportunity to optimize your product, or the opportunity for users to vent their current solution, or a problem that has been overlooked for some time. Either you will find that the opportunity is strong enough to drive the whole team to solve it, or the opportunity point has actually been solved and we need to pick it up and focus on another hypothesis.

There are readers who question: "What can I do to help you do better?" I'm afraid it's another way to ask, "What do you need?" Therefore, in user research is more inclined to let users to show in the work of which part of the problem is to let users describe the pain point, and do not ask users about any design problems, Design issues need to be left to the professionals to decide. The author of this article gives the "What is the way to help you do better", is the extension of the first two issues, to examine the user at this stage of the solution is what, to help researchers better understand the situation of users at the same time to give themselves some inspiration, so the strict sense does not count on users to determine the impact of products, but belong to information collection and reference.

In user research, using these 3 basic questions, I can be very efficient for my team to verify assumptions so that we can provide users with lasting value rather than just patching up the product.

When you visit users, what questions do you like to ask to help you build or optimize your product? I don't like to talk too much, but rather love being a loyal listener to the user.