Customer & User Interviews
Interviews generate great insights into customers and users, especially when combined with other research methods. This page covers the key elements, typical mistakes, and good readings. Download an interview sample and an exercise for your team.
Content
1. Overview
Explorative interviews uncover new, exciting and surprising information. They build a deep understanding of behaviours, needs, emotions and preferences — not completeness, objectivity or statistically validated data. It's about exploration and a professional gut feeling! Don't think ahead about how you'll use the information. Your job is to listen well and step into your interview partner's life for a short moment. Fully engage with them — they matter, and they're the expert here. It's all about their experience.
Follow the steps on the Discovering Customers & Users page to plan and review your interviews during Step 2: Discover, or set up a field study to lay the perfect foundation for your Business Design sprint.
2. Key Elements
Element | Comment | Time |
Introduction | Introduce yourself and explain the purpose and length of the conversation. Throughout the interview, make your counterpart feel that their insights carry real strategic value for your company. | 5 min. |
"Get to know" | Survey relevant demographic information about your interview partner — for example age, profession, company size, position, or budget. Start with an open question like "Tell me something about yourself or your job...". Only ask for what you actually need to understand their behaviour and motivations. | 5 min. |
Opening questions | In which cases does your topic affect the interview partner? How often are they in contact with that topic? When did it happen last time? Identify a past situation, for example from last week, that you can reflect on together. Choose one that matters to your counterpart and happens often. Understanding past situations in depth lets you apply that knowledge to new situations later on. | 10 min. |
Customer journey(s) | Reflect together with your interview partner on the situation you chose. Use guiding questions to get concrete — "What did you do first? How did you prepare?" Walk through your interviewee’s behaviour step by step: this is the customer journey. For each step, ask about the environment („Who was involved?“, „Where?“, „When?“) and about positive and negative emotions. Identifying emotions isn't enough — dig into them. Trigger questions help you explore both good and bad moments at each stage: "What worked out quite well?", "What bothered or disturbed you?", "What did you think in that moment?", "How did you feel?", "Why?", "What are the consequences?" Stay in listening mode. Dig into unexpected answers and keep asking („Why?“) to understand motivations. If possible, ask your counterpart to demonstrate each step, or show you the tools, rooms and environments involved — even after the interview, with photos or videos. If the journey you chose has only a few short steps, discuss a second one if time allows. | 30 min. |
Ideas for improvements | This is the first point in the interview where you talk about the future. If your interview partner has ideas on how to improve the situations you discussed, let them share them now — this part is optional, for creative interview partners. Don’t take these ideas too seriously: customers usually can't tell you what they really need, especially for revolutionary change. That's your job. Use their answers to dig deeper and understand what's behind the wish. | 5 min. |
Role models | Ask your interviewee whether they have a role model or an inspiring company they look up to in this area. Find out exactly which characteristics of that role model they consider worth aiming for. | optional |
Conclusion | Close the interview by thanking your interview partner and explaining the next steps. If the information was valuable, ask if they're willing to talk again — and who else you should talk to. | 5 min. |
3. Usage Scenarios
Understanding customers & users in the Step 2: Discover (or in a prior field study) to come up with new ideas
Explore antilogs from your Hypotheses & Experiments template about the behaviour and emotions of your customers & users in a specific situation
4. Instructions for Coaches
Make sure Team Members run the field study themselves. First-hand impressions help them advocate for their customers throughout the End-to-End Innovation Process.
Help your team prepare an interview guideline based on the structure and key elements in this article. Define the customer journey steps in advance — this keeps the interview specific and concrete.
Make sure your Team Members are trained before they run interviews, so they ask questions the right way. Include a role play: staying neutral, being specific about past examples, and asking "Why?" a lot. Discuss typical mistakes in the team (see below), and go through a good and a bad interview example together (see exercise below).
Be aware that contacting the right people and arranging dates can take time.
A personal interview shouldn't last longer than 60 to 90 minutes (on the telephone not longer than 45 minutes).
Conduct interviews in a pleasant atmosphere — ideally, let the interview partner choose the location.
Record interviews with the interview partner's consent. A photo helps you document and share the interview with your team later. Prepare an agreement that clarifies how you'll use the data in your project.
Combine interviews with Customer & User Observations whenever possible — visual impressions add real value. Let interviewees demonstrate their behaviour step by step, or show you the tools, documents, rooms, and materials they use. Videos or photos they send afterwards, or bring as homework, extend your understanding too.
Help your team document the results of an interview visually. Personas or Customer & User Cards — or simple mind maps — are a great way to capture what you found.
Visual stimuli help people talk about emotions! Include pictures or moodboards to spark metaphorical thinking, and let your interview partners describe their feelings through a stimulus. For example, the board game "Dixit" has beautiful images we've used in interviews to reflect on feelings in a specific situation together with the interviewee.
5. Q & A
What do bad questions look like? "You like your mobile phone, right?", "It will save your time - do you like it?", "Would you use it?", "Will you buy it?", "How much would you pay for it?", "What would your dream app look like?"
What do good questions look like? "What do you usually do on your mobile phone?", "What’s the last thing you did with it?", "Tell me more about that.", "Can you show me what you did?", "Why do you bother?", "What else have you tried?", "Who else should I talk to?"
Why talk about real situations instead of asking general questions? The answers you get will be more honest than with general questions. Ask "Do you like doing sports?" and you'll often hear "Sure, sports is important." Ask "How often did you do sports last week? Tell me about it" and you get the real picture: "Well, last week was different — I was travelling, and when I'm not at home I can't...". Start with general questions if you like, then follow up with real situations to spot the difference between "saying" and "doing".
Some people tend to answer what they think we want to hear — that's called Response Bias (read more about it here). This is why talking about past experiences, like described above, matters so much. It's much harder to give inaccurate answers when you talk about what you did yesterday.
What if my interview partner won't open up and only gives short answers? Try to activate them: "Can you talk me through the last time this happened?" or "Tell me more about it." If that doesn't work, end the interview politely — it's normal to occasionally talk to the wrong person. Just continue.
After a few interviews I noticed that I never stick to the guideline. Is that a problem? The guideline is only a mental support — you don't need to follow it line by line. Being a good listener matters more. Just check that your interviews still cover the main parts (e.g. a specific customer journey) and still deliver valuable information. If not, adapt your guideline before you continue.
How to find "Golden Nuggets"? Watch out for emotions — they're usually your trigger to dig deeper into a topic. Help your counterpart reflect on emotional situations. Emotions drive consumer behaviour and decision-making, even in B2B — but they're usually unconscious and need to be uncovered.
6. Exercise
We prepared an example of a good and a bad interview for you (see download). Read out the bad example first and discuss: "Why is this a bad interview?" Then read out the good example and discuss: "Why is this a good interview?" — and how you could ask better follow-up questions.
7. Typical Mistakes
"Doing it wrong is worse than doing nothing at all!" (Rob Fitzpatrick, The Mom Test, 2013)
These mistakes typically happen when Team Members try to understand customers and users through interviews without support. That's why it's key for the Team Coach (or Research Expert) to help the team prepare and run useful interviews.
Lacking preparation: Talking to customers and users looks easy — it isn't. Always prepare: a guideline and a dry run are non-negotiable.
Avoiding personal interviews: Many teams find reasons to skip personal interviews and settle for a phone call. Phone interviews are never as good — the effort is worth it. When personal interviews really aren't possible, a virtual one still beats no interview at all!
Asking bad questions: Teams tend to ask about the future. Customers and users can't really answer that — but they'll answer anyway! Don't take those answers literally.
We make incorrect predictions about our future behaviour because we underestimate the influence of our mental state — a bias called Empathy Gap (learn more here). The best way to avoid it: don't talk about future behaviour.
Not sticking to the guideline: A good guideline is half the battle — sticking to it and staying concrete during a real conversation is the hard part. Interviews that stay too general, especially around the customer journey, produce information that's often useless for your project.
Jumping in journeys: Interview partners aren't used to retelling a situation step by step. It's your job to keep them in the journey, at the right level of detail.
Forgetting about emotions: Teams shy away from emotional questions and focus only on behaviour. But emotions are key to spotting innovation potential.
Not asking "Why": It's the most important question in any interview — even when you think you already know the answer. Skip it, and most of what you gather is useless.
Defending your company: The moment they hear negative feedback, some Team Members start defending their company and explaining why a product looks the way it does. Stop it — you're here to listen.
Preparing useless documentation: Field studies produce a lot of insights — not all of them useful. The challenge is picking the "Golden Nuggets" and documenting them so others can learn from them. Good documentation walks others through the customer journey step by step, pains and gains included. Direct quotes describe emotions best. A bullet-point summary of an interview isn't enough.
Fitzpatrick, R.: The Mom Test (Amazon)
Constable, G.: Talking to Humans (PDF version)
Zaltman, G.: How Customers Think (Amazon)
Hansen, M.: Deploy Empathy