User Research

How to do an interview?

SAMPLE: Interview & Conversation Guide

Interviewing Checklist

User research is all about understanding the people who will be using a product or service. Researchers use various methods to uncover users' needs, behaviors, and motivations. This information is then used to inform the design and development processes & decisions, with the goal of creating something that is truly user-centered and meets their needs.

Note: User research is different from user testing.

You can use this page/guide, if you already have a product/solution that you’d like feedback.⁠

While there are several reasons to do user research, some of the key motivations could be:

Understanding Users: The main aim of user research is to understand the needs of our traditional users and those we’d like to have as our users. While one can use interviews, surveys, and testing to better understand user needs, understanding who the user is and how they can be part of the conversation––through recruitment––is sometimes more important because it defines how intentionally you are thinking of your learning process from the users.

Informing Design: The information collected through user research can be contextualized in qualitative, quantitative, themes, and other different tools. This is mainly to understand the nuances of the needs, similarities, and differences between the users identified and interacted with during the research. Through this deep analysis of what users want and need, you are able to reflect on how decision makers can central more pressing needs, and inform the design of their strategies, tools, and services.

Methodologies

There isn't a one-size-fits-all approach to user research. Researchers use a variety of methods depending on the project and the information they are trying to gather. Some common methods are:

Interviews: One-on-one conversations with users to gain in-depth insights into their thoughts and experiences. That said, interviews can also be two-on-one, where the facilitator builds an interview guide that enables two participant to interact with each other and inform the outcome in partnership. Interviews and workshops are most often identified as qualitative tools.

Surveys: Not all questions need to be asked in person. Questionnaires can be used to gather data from a larger group of users, and this step is usually referred to as quantitative information collection.

Usability Testing: User testing is a design method for learning how an intended audience would respond to or use a product, service, or communication. This is done by presenting prototypes to the people who would be seeing or using the final version and observing how they interact with, the prototypes.

Some other tools are:

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Comparative analysis⁠

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Dot Voting⁠

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Identifying hopes and fears⁠

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Story-telling or -boarding⁠

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