Why User Interviews Haven't Evolved in 20 Years (And How We're Changing That)

A great user experience (UX) is one of the largest drivers of growth and revenue through user satisfaction. However, when budgets get tight, or there is a squeeze on timelines, user research is one of the first things to go. Often at the cost of user satisfaction.  

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This short sighted view can mean project managers are preoccupied with achieving milestones and short term goals. And UX teams get stuck researching products they weren’t actually involved with developing. As a result no one has the space and understanding to really develop a product that speaks to users needs, desires and wants. There must  be a better way to produce a product that is user-driven.  Thankfully there is.

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What is user research and why should project managers care about it? 👨🏻💻

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User research is an important part of the product development process. Primarily, user research involves using different research methods to gather information about your end users. 

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Essentially it aims to create the best possible experience for your users by listening and learning directly from those that already or potentially will use your product. You might conduct interviews to help you understand a particular problem, carry out a tree test to identify bottlenecks or problems in your navigation, or do some usability testing to directly observe your users as they perform different tasks on your website or in your app. Or a combination of these to understand what users really want.

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To a project manager and team, this likely sounds fairly familiar, that any project can’t be managed in a silo. Regular check-ins and feedback are essential to making smart decisions. The same with UX research. It can make the whole process quicker and more efficient. By taking a step back, digging into your users’ minds, and gaining a fuller understanding of what they want upfront, it can curtail short-term views and decisions.

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Bringing more user research into your development process has major benefits for the team, and the ultimately the quality of that final product. There are three key benefits:

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1. Saves your development team time and effort. Ensuring the team is working on what users want, not wasting time on features that don’t measure up.
2. Gives your users a better experience by meeting their requirements.
3. Helps your team innovate quickly by understanding what users really want.

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As a project manager, making space and planning for user research can be one of the best ways to ensure the team is creating a product that truly is user-driven.

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How to bring research into your product development process 🤔

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There are a couple of ways you can bring UX research into your product development process. 

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1. Start with a dedicated research project.
2. Integrate UX research throughout the development project.

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It can be more difficult to integrate UX research throughout the process, as it means planning the project with various stages of research built in to check the development of features. But ultimately this approach is likely to turn out the best product. One that has been considered, checked and well thought out through the whole product development process. To help you on the way we have laid out 6 key steps to help you integrate UX research into your product development process.

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6 key steps to integrate UX research 👟

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Step 1: Define your research questions

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Take a step back, look at your product and define your research questions. 

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It may be tempting just to ask, ‘do users like our latest release?’ This however does not get to why or what your users like or don’t like. Try instead:

• What do our users really want from our product?
• Where are they currently struggling while using our website?
• How can we design a better product for our users?

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These questions help to form the basis of specific questions about your product and specific areas of research to explore which in turn help shape the type of research you undertake.

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Step 2: Create your research plan

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With a few key research questions to focus on, it’s time to create your research plan.

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A great research plan covers your project’s goals, scope, timing, and deliverables. It’s essential for keeping yourself organized but also for getting key stakeholder signoff.

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Step 3: Prepare any research logistics

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Every project plan requires attention to detail including a user research project. And with any good project there are a set of steps to help make sense of it.

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1. Method: Based on your questions, what is the best user research method to use? 
2. Schedule: When will the research take place? How long will it go on for? If this is ongoing research, plan how it will be implemented and how often.
3. Location: Where will the research take place? 
4. Resources: What resources do you need? This could be technical support or team members.
5. Participants: Define who you want to research. Who is eligible to take part in this research? How will you find the right people?
6. Data: How will you capture the research data? Where will it be stored? How will you analyze the data and create insights and reports that can be used?
7. Deliverables: What is the ultimate goal for your research project?

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Step 4: Decide which method will be used

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Many user research methods benefit from an observational style of testing. Particularly if you are looking into why users undertake a specific task or struggle.

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Typically, there are two approaches to testing:

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1. Moderated testing is when a moderator is present during the test to answer questions, guide the participant, or dig deeper with further questions.
2. Unmoderated testing is when a participant is left on their own to carry out the task. Often this is done remotely and with very specific instructions.Your key questions will determine which method will works best for your research.  Find our more about the differences.

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Step 5: Run your research session

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It’s time to gather insights and data. The questions you are asking will influence how you run your research sessions and the methods you’ve chosen. 

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If you are running surveys you will be asking users through a banner or invitation to fill out your survey. Unmoderated and very specific questions. Gathering qualitative data and analyzing patterns.

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If you’re using something qualitative like interviews or heat mapping, you’ll want to implement software and gather as much information as possible.

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Step 6: Prepare a research findings report and share with stakeholders

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Analyze your findings, interrogate your data and find those insights that dive into the way your users think. How do they love your product? But how do they also struggle?

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Pull together your findings and insights into an easy to understand report. And get socializing. Bring your key stakeholders together and share your findings. Bringing everyone across the findings together can bring everyone on the journey. And for the development process can mean decisions can be user-driven. 

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Wrap Up 🥙

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Part of any project, UX research should be essential to developing a product that is user-driven. Integrating user research into your development process can be challenging. But with planning and strategy it can be hugely beneficial to saving time and money in the long run. 

Few UX research techniques can surpass the user interview for the simple fact that you can gain a number of in-depth insights by speaking to just a handful of people. Yes, the prospect of sitting down in front of your customers can be a daunting one, but you’ll gain a level of insight and detail that really is tough to beat.

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This research method is popular for a reason – it’s extremely flexible and can deliver deep, meaningful results in a relatively short amount of time.

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We’ve put together this article for both user interview newbies and old hands alike. Our intention is to give you a guide that you can refer back to so you can make sure you're getting the most out of this technique. Of course, feel free to leave a comment if you think there’s something else we should add.

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What is a user interview?

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User interviews are a technique you can use to capture qualitative information from your customers and other people you’re interested in learning from. For example, you may want to interview a group of retirees before developing a new product aimed at their market.

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User interviews usually follow the format of a guided conversation, diving deep into a particular topic. While sometimes you may have some predefined questions or topics to cover, the focus of your interviews can change depending on what you learn along the way.

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Given the format, user interviews can help you answer any number of questions, such as:

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• How do people currently shop online? Are there any products they would never consider purchasing this way?
• How do people feel about using meal delivery services? What stops them from trying them out?
• How do ride sharing drivers figure out which app to use when they’re about to start a shift?

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It’s important to remember that user interviews are all about people's perception of something, not usability. What this means in practical terms is that you shouldn’t go into a user interview expecting to find out how they navigate through a particular app, product or website. Those are answers you can gain through usability testing.

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When should you interview your users?

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Now that we have an understanding of what user interviews are and the types of questions this method can help you answer, when should you do them? As this method will give you insights into why people think the way they do, what they think is important and any suggestions they have, they’re mostly useful in the discovery stages of the design process when you're trying to understand the problem space.

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You may want to run a series of user interviews at the start of a project in order to inform the design process. Interviews with users can help you to create detailed personas, generate feature ideas based on real user needs and set priorities. Looked at another way, doesn’t it seem like an unnecessary risk not to talk to your users before building something for them?

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Plan your research

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Before sitting down and writing your user interview, you need to figure out your research question. This is the primary reason for running your user interviews – your ‘north star’. It’s also a good idea to engage with your stakeholders when trying to figure this question out as they’ll be able to give you useful insights and feedback.

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A strong research question will help you to create interview questions that are aligned and give you a clear goal. The key thing is to make sure that it’s a strong, concise goal that relates to specific user behaviors. You don’t want to start planning for your interview with a research question like “How do customers use our mobile app”. It’s far too broad to direct your interview planning.

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Write your questions

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Now it’s time to write your user interview questions. If you’ve taken the time to engage with stakeholders and you’ve created a solid research question, this step should be relatively straightforward.

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Here are a few things to focus on when writing your interview questions:

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• Encourage your interviewees to tell stories: There’s a direct correlation between the questions you write for a user interview and the answers you get back. Consider more open-ended questions, with the aim of getting your interviewees to tell you stories and share more detail. For example, “Tell me about the last car you owned” is much better than “What was the last car you owned”.
• Consider different types of questions: You don’t want to dive right into the complex, detailed questions when your interviewee has barely walked into the room. It’s much better to start an interview off with several ‘warm-up’ questions, that will get them in the right frame of mind. Think questions like: “What do you do for work?” and “How often do you use a computer at home?”. Answering these questions will put them in the right frame of mind for the rest of the interview.
• Start with as many questions as you can think of – then trim: This can be quite a helpful exercise. When you’re actually putting pen to paper (or fingers to keyboard) and writing your questions, go broad at first. Then, once you’ve got a large selection to choose from, trim them back.
• Have someone review your questions: Whether it’s another researcher on your team or perhaps someone who’s familiar with the audience you plan to interview, get another pair of eyes on your questions. Beyond just making sure they all make sense and are appropriate, they may be able to point out any questions you may have missed.

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Recruit participants

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Having a great set of questions is all well and good, but you need to interview the right kind of people. It’s not always easy. Finding representative or real users can quickly suck up a lot of time and bog down your other work. But this doesn’t have to be the case. With some strategy and planning you can make the process of participant recruitment quick and easy.

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There are 2 main ways to go about recruitment. You can either handle the process yourself – we’ll share some tips for how to do this below – or use a recruitment service. Using a dedicated recruitment service will save you the hassle of actively searching for participants, which can often become a significant time-sink.

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If you’re planning to recruit people yourself, here are a few ways to go about the process. You may find that using multiple methods is the best way to net the pool of participants you need.

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• Reach out to your customer support team: There’s a ready source of real users available in every organization: the customer support team. These are the people that speak to your organization’s customers every day, and have a direct line to their problems and pain points. Working with this team is a great way to access suitable participants, plus customers will value the fact that you’re taking the time to speak to them.
• Recruit directly from your website: Support messaging apps like Intercom and intercept recruiting tools like Ethnio allow you to recruit participants directly from your website by serving up live intercepts. This is a fast, relatively hands-off way to recruit people quickly.
• Ask your social media followers: LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook can be great sources of research participants. There’s also the bonus that you can broadcast the fact that your organization focuses on research – and that’s always good publicity! If you don’t have a large following, you can also run paid ads on different social platforms.

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Once a pool of participants start to flow in, consider setting up a dedicated research panel where you can log their details and willingness to take part in future research. It may take some admin at the start, but you’ll save time in the long run.

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Note: Figure out a plan for participant data protection before you start collecting and storing their information. As the researcher, it’s up to you to take proper measures for privacy and confidentiality, from the moment you collect an email address until you delete it. Only store information in secure locations, and make sure you get consent before you ever turn on a microphone recorder or video camera.

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Run your interviews

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Now for the fun part – running your user interviews. In most cases, user interviews follow a simple format. You sit down next to your participant and run through your list of questions, veering into new territory if you sense an interesting discussion. At the end, you thank them for their time and pass along a small gift (such as a voucher) as a thank-you.

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Of course, there are a few other things that you’ll want to keep in mind if you really want to conduct the best possible interviews.

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• Involve others: User interviews are a great way to show the value of research and give people within your organization a direct insight into how users think. There are no hard and fast rules around who you should bring to a user interview, just consider how useful the experience is likely to be for them. If you like, you can also assign them the role of notetaker.
• Record the interview: You’ll have to get consent from the interviewee, but having a recording of the interview will make the process of analysis that much easier. In addition to being able to listen to the recording again, you can convert the entire session into a searchable text file.
• Don’t be afraid to go off-script: Interviewing is a skill, meaning that the more interviews you conduct, the better you’re going to get. Over time, you’ll find that you’re able to naturally guide the conversation in different directions as you pick up on things the interviewee says. Don’t be discouraged if you find yourself sticking to your prepared questions during your first few interviews.
• Be attentive: You don’t want to come across as a brick wall when interviewing someone – you want to be seen as an attentive listener. This means confirming that you’re listening by nodding, making eye contact and asking follow-up questions naturally (this last one may take practice). If you really struggle to ask follow-up questions, try writing a few generic questions can you can use at different points throughout the interview, for example “Could you tell me more about that?”. There’s a great guide on UXmatters about the role empathy has to play in understanding users.
• Debrief afterwards: Whether it’s just you or you and a notetaker, take some time after the interview to go over how it went. This is a good opportunity to take down any details either you may have missed and to reflect and discuss some of the key takeaways.

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Analyze your interview findings

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At first glance, analyzing the qualitative data you’ve captured from a user interview can seem daunting. But, with the right approach (and some useful tools) you can extract each and every useful insight.

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If you’ve recorded your interview sessions, you’ll need to convert your audio recordings into text files. We recommend a tool like Descript. This software makes it easy to take an audio file of your recording and transform it into a document, which is much faster than doing it without dedicated software. If you like, there’s also the option of various ‘white glove’ services where someone will transcribe the interview for you.

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With your interview recordings transcribed and notes in-hand, you can start the process of thematic analysis. If you’re unfamiliar, thematic analysis is one of the most popular approaches for qualitative research as it helps you to find different patterns and themes in your data. There are 2 ways to approach this. The first is largely manual, where you set up a spreadsheet with different themes like ‘navigation issue’ and ‘design problem’, and group your findings into these areas. This can be done using sticky notes, which used to be a common ways to analyze findings.

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The second involves dedicated qualitative research tool like Reframer. You log your notes over the course of several interview sessions and then use Reframer’s tagging functionality to assign tags to different insights. By applying tags to your observations, you can then use its analysis features to create wider themes. The real benefit here is that there’s no chance of losing your past interviews and analysis as everything is stored in one place. You can also easily download your findings into a spreadsheet to share them with your team.

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What’s next?

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With your interviews all wrapped up and your analysis underway, you’re likely wondering what’s next. There’s a good chance your interviews will have opened up new areas you’d like to test, so now could be the perfect time to assess other qualitative research methods and add more human data to your research project. On the other hand, you may want to move onto quantitative research and put some numbers behind your research.

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Whether you choose to proceed down a qualitative or quantitative path, we’re pulled together some more useful articles and things for you to read:

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• Qualitative research methods – A breakdown of various qualitative research methods and why you’d want to use this research approach in the first place.
• Taking better notes for better sensemaking – Learn how you can improve your notetaking abilities before your next user interview or usability test.
• 13 time-saving tips and tools for conducting great user interviews – User interviews can be time-sinks, so take a look at these tips to make the process as smooth as possible.
• Pros and cons of conducting user interviews (Interaction Design Foundation) – A really useful resource that breaks down the pros and cons of user interviews.
• Tool: Reframer – You can use Reframer (our qualitative note taking tool) to capture detailed notes during your interviews. Then, you can apply tags and use Reframer’s analysis features to make the most of your interview data.
• Tool: Descript – Transcribing interviews is arduous, and can often take more time than the interview itself. Use a transcription tool like Descript to speed the process up.
• 16 tips for better user interviews – If you’d like another checklist to run through before you start your user interviews, this one is worth checking out.

Are we exaggerating when we say that the way the researchers run and analyze user interviews hasn’t changed in 20 years? We don’t think so. When we talk to our customers to try and understand their current workflows, they look exactly the same as they did when we started this business 17 years ago: record, transcribe, analyze manually, create reports. See the problem?

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Despite  advances in technology across every industry, the fundamental process of conducting and analyzing user interviews has remained largely unchanged. While we've transformed how we design, develop, and deploy products, the way we understand our users is still trapped in workflows that would feel familiar to product, design and research teams from decades ago.

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The Same Old Interview Analysis Workflow 

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For most researchers, in the best case scenario, Interview analysis can take several hours over the span of multiple days. Yet in that same timeframe, in part thanks to new and emerging AI tools, an engineering team can design, build, test, and deploy new features. That just doesn't make sense.

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The problem isn't that researchers  lack tools. It's that they haven’t had the right ones. Most tools focus on transcription and storage, treating interviews like static documents rather than dynamic sources of intelligence. Testing with just 5 users can uncover 85% of usability problems, yet most teams struggle to complete even basic analysis in time to influence product decisions. Luckily, things are finally starting to change.

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When it comes to user research, three things are happening in the industry right now that are forcing a transformation:

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1. The rise of AI means UX research matters more than ever. With AI accelerating product development cycles, the cost of building the wrong thing has never been higher. Companies that invest in UX early cut development time by 33-50%, and with AI, that advantage compounds exponentially.
2. We're drowning in data and have fewer resources.  We’re seeing the need for UX research increase, while simultaneously UX research teams are more resource constrained than ever. Tasks like analyzing hours of video content to gather insights, just isn’t something teams have time for anymore. 
3. AI finally understands research. AI has evolved to a place where it can actually provide valuable insights. Not just transcription. Real research intelligence that recognizes patterns, emotions, and the gap between what users say and what they actually mean.

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A Dirty Little Research Secret + A Solution 

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We’re just going to say it; most user insights from interviews never make it past the recording stage. When it comes to talking to users, the vast majority of researchers in our audience talk about recruiting pain because the most commonly discussed challenge around interviews is usually finding enough participants who match their criteria. But on top of the challenge of finding the right people to talk to, there’s another challenge that’s even worse: finding time to analyze what users tell us. But, what if you had a tool where using AI, the moment you uploaded an interview video, key themes, pain points, and opportunities surfaced automatically? What if you could ask your interview footage questions and get back evidence-based answers with video citations?

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This isn't about replacing human expertise, it's about augmenting  it. AI-powered tools can process and categorize data within hours or days, significantly reducing workload. But more importantly, they can surface patterns and connections that human analysts might miss when rushing through analysis under deadline pressure. Thanks to AI, we're witnessing the beginning of a research renaissance and a big part of that is reimagining the way we do user interviews.

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Why AI for User Interviews is a Game Changer 

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When interview analysis accelerates from weeks to hours, everything changes.

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Product teams can validate ideas before building them. Design teams can test concepts in real-time. Engineering teams can prioritize features based on actual user need, not assumptions. Product, Design and Research teams who embrace AI to help with these workflows, will be surfacing insights, generating evidence-backed recommendations, and influencing product decisions at the speed of thought.

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We know that 32% of all customers would stop doing business with a brand they loved after one bad experience. Talking to your users more often makes it possible to prevent these experiences by acting on user feedback before problems become critical. When every user insight comes with video evidence, when every recommendation links to supporting clips, when every user story includes the actual user telling it, research stops being opinion and becomes impossible to ignore. When you can more easily gather, analyze and share the content from user interviews those real user voices start to get referenced in executive meetings. Product decisions begin to include user clips. Engineering sprints start to reference actual user needs. Marketing messages reflect real user voices and language.

The best product, design and research teams are already looking for tools that can support this transformation. They know that when interviews become intelligent, the entire organization becomes more user-centric. At Optimal, we're focused on improving the traditional user interviews workflow by incorporating revolutionary AI features into our tools. Stay tuned for exciting updates on how we're reimagining user interviews.