 If done right, user interviews can be a great source of inspiration and help you to build solutions that your customers will actually love. In this video, you'll learn how you can structure user interviews to actually get those deep insights and also make it an enjoyable experience for everyone involved. Let the show begin. Hi, I'm Mark and welcome to the Service Design Show. This show is all about helping service designers like you build organizations that put people at the heart of their business. One way to do that is to actually talk to your customer in order to understand what they actually need in order to build those services that they will love. User interviews are a great way to do this and I think we use user interviews in 80% of our projects. For me, it's one of the most fun and enjoyable parts of the design process. And although I love user interviews, there is one big challenge I see happening with researchers who have less or little experience and they end up formulating the wrong questions. They end up tweeting user interviews more like surveys where they start to check off questions from a list rather than actually engaging in a conversation. Yes, they will get answers to their questions, but will they get insights that they actually need? Probably not. And this way of interviewing also isn't a really enjoyable experience for anyone, neither for the participant, but it's also not really enjoyable for you to just check off questions. So let's look at what you can do or how you can structure user interviews to get those deep insights that you need to build those solutions your customers will love and also make it a fun and enjoyable experience for everyone involved. So let's use an case study, an example for the rest of the video that will help us to understand how to structure these user interviews. And the case study is that where our challenge or ambition is to improve the wine buying experience, make it a more enjoyable experience. Now, everything you're going to hear is based on a lot of assumptions and in real life, the exact questions you'd be asking will be determined by a lot of external factors, but we have to start somewhere, right? And the other thing is that with every question you're going to ask, you need to dig deeper. You need to ask why at least five times, we're not going to do that for the sake of simplicity in this video. But remember with every example that I give, you need to dig deeper, you don't stop after you've asked your question and you got the answer. Now, you continue. That's just your starting point. OK, so let's go back to the wine buying experience. Let me give you some examples of questions you shouldn't be asking. These are questions like, how can we improve the experience for you? Or would you like if we did this? Or would you prefer a solution A or solution B? Those are really bad questions to ask in a user interview in the discovery phase. If you know more classic, typical, bad examples of questions that you've heard in user interviews, leave them down below in the comments. I love to hear them. So the first thing you need to do in a user interview is to set expectations. You need to explain to the other person why you're talking to them. This is really important and you want to explain that you're not doing a survey. You're not interested in answers. So a way we would approach is around the wine buying experience would be something like we want to create something, we want to create a wine buying experience that people actually enjoy. And in order to do that, we need to understand who our customers are, what they need, what their needs are, what their desires are. And that's the reason I'm talking to you to understand a little bit more about that. That could be a great way to actually open a conversation and set the expectations while you're here. So after you've set the expectations, you need to ease in into the topic. I repeat, you need to ease into the topic. A classic mistake I see researchers making is just going head first and just bombarding people with their agenda, with our wine buying agenda. You have to realize that the person you are talking to is probably not thinking about wine buying, they're just living their life. They're just they're not aware of what is important to you. They are aware of what is important to them. And we need to start with that. So we like to ease into the topic by asking really simple questions that people can relate to and can easily answer. So in our case, it might be something simple like, what are the first words that come to your mind when you think about wine? People could say like friends, confusion, enjoyment. They will usually be able to relate to those kind of questions. Why are we asking this? Because already an answer that we get to a question like this, what words do you associate with wine and it would be friends. That might be emotions that might be triggers that we could use in actually thinking about improving their wine buying experience. So it already gives us data while we're relating to the person we're talking to. The next thing you want to embed in the structure of your user interview is that you ask questions that are embedded in reality. We're not interested in opinions or wishful thinking. And the reason why we want questions that are grounded in reality is people lie to themselves. We lie to ourselves. We give answers to what we think we might do, but we often usually don't end up doing. So what I mean with questions that are grounded in reality is by asking questions about things that actually happened, which people actually did. So in our wine buying example, we could ask a question, what is the last time you drank wine? Where was that? Who was with you? What kind of occasion was it? It's a question that people have to relate to something that they actually did. The answer could also be I never drink wine, but then we selected people we're talking to incorrectly. But assuming that people do have an answer, try to ground it in reality. And we could also ask questions about when was the last time you actually bought wine, you know, in order to start easing into the wine buying experience. So was it in a restaurant? Was it in a store? Did you do it online? We can sort of start to actually grab things that people actually did instead of trying to figure out what they might be doing. But I do want to give a warning, even with these questions that are grounded in reality, people don't. It's hard for most people to actually give an honest answer. It's not that they want to lie to you. It's just hard to give an honest answer. So if you have the opportunity and this is not always in every project, but if you have the opportunity, give people an assignment and observe what they do. So, for instance, in this case, and this is actually what we've done in some of our project, give people 20 euros and say, please take this money and buy a bottle of wine in the next week and document the process in this diary. Because then you actually can follow along what people do and how they spend that money and how they buy the wine. So these kind of questions, if you have the opportunity to actually give assignments and observe behavior, that's so much more valuable than actually asking questions. But if you do ask questions, make sure they are grounded in things that people have actually done and not in what they think they will do on a final. But very important note. And this is something I already addressed at the beginning of this video. The exact questions will differ depending on your context, depending on the company you're working for, depending on the challenge you're working on, depending on the country you live in. And it might be that in order to understand and create a better wine buying experience, we might have to go back all the way and create a much broader set of questions that focuses on shopping. For instance, how what is your preferred way of shopping, understanding what the frustrations are with shopping, understanding what types of buyers people are that could be a whole set of questions on its own. It's hard to determine that now, but in your project, you have to just be aware that you sometimes need to zoom out to actually understand the frustrations, the pains, the desires of your customers. It's not always that you just focus on the thing you want to know, wine buying, you could also focus on things like shopping. Just keep that in mind. Everything depends on your context. And I hear you thinking when I'm asking these questions, could I be able to create personas? Yes, definitely. You'll start to recognize patterns. You start to recognize different types of customers. And it's very, very likely that you'll get answers on which you'll be able to create personas. And if you want to know more about how to create personas that are actually useful, check out this video over here. As you probably already know, doing good user interviews is both an art and a science, and there is so much more to it. So if you want to dig deeper into this topic, check out the video over here where we talk more about that. So thanks for watching and I'll see you in this next video.