Designing insightful interviews

Interviews might not have been your first choice, but we encourage exploring interviews as a valuable tool for understanding use cases. Use a survey to gather general information, and do a click analysis (or log analysis) to get actual behavior. An interview is vital to get a cohesive feel for the customer. It has its downsides: it is hard to scale, results are more open to interpretation, and it is sometimes challenging to get the right mix of customers. The upside is the feeling you get for the customer and the empathy one can embody as the customer advocate during the design process. This will enrich the project. In surveys, consider finishing with questions about participating in future user research. Although this is self-selecting, it is fruitful almost all of the time.

There might be time for five to ten interviews, but most teams will unlikely invest in more than 20. Targeting the right audience has value. The cost of setting up the interviews...