Interview

When to use customer interviews

Customer interviews are great for any stage of your development process, but are particularly valuable when conducted in the early design and prototyping phases. The earlier you identify issues, the cheaper it is to fix them.

What you’ll learn in customer interviews

Remote customer interviews can help you:

• Allow for unique, individualized follow-up questions in real time
• Ensure that participants don’t get stuck while doing something technically difficult, like dealing with a complex or low-fidelity prototype
• Ensure quiet participants are more vocal, since the moderator can prompt them to share what they’re thinking
• Provide in-depth details about a user’s actions, thoughts, and feelings

How to conduct a customer interview

Depending on the human insight solution you use, most customer interviews are conducted via web conferencing in which the moderator and participant can share screens as they talk.

Moderators can see what participants are doing, and they can both communicate with each other. These sessions should be centered around prompting the test participant to provide in-depth responses. Moderators will typically intervene only when necessary to help a test participant move through a difficult task or to probe for greater detail in an answer.