Conducting User Experience Interviews

🚫 How to Run UX Research Without Access To Users. With practical techniques to avoid guesswork and gather insights if you can’t talk directly to users. Attached cheatsheet (with and without access to users) by Nielsen Norman Group. 🚫 Ask for reasons for no access to users: there might be none. ✅ First, study job openings to map existing workflows/tasks. ✅ Make friends with sales, customer success, support, QA. ✅ Find colleagues who are the closest to your customers. ✅ Convey your questions indirectly via your colleagues. ✅ If you can’t get users to come to you, go where they are. ✅ Ask to observe or shadow customers at their workplace. ✅ Listen in to customer calls and interview call centre staff. ✅ Request access to analytics, CRM reports, call centre logs. ✅ Use Google Trends to find product-related search queries. ✅ Gather insights from search logs, Jira backlog, support tickets. ✅ Explore past/ongoing NPS and Voice-of-Customer programs. ✅ Study reviews, discussions, comments for your product/competitors. ✅ Map key themes and user sentiment on TrustPilot, AppStore etc. ✅ Recruit users via UserTesting, Wynter (B2B), Maze, UserInterviews. ✅ Ask for small but steady commitments: 5 users × 30 mins, 1× month. 🚫 Avoid ad-hoc research: set up regular check-ins and timelines. As H Locke noted, if we shed the light strongly enough from many sources, we might end up getting a glimpse of the truth. Ironically, the stakeholders who can’t give you time or resources to talk to users often are the first to demand evidence to support your initiatives. Sometimes the reason why companies are reluctant to grant access to users is simply the lack of trust. They don’t want to disturb relationships with big clients which is carefully maintained by the customer success team. They might feel that research is merely a technical detail that clients shouldn’t be bothered with. Show that you deeply care about that relationship and that you don’t want to disturb it any way. What you do want though is to reduce costs and risk — the risk of drawing wide-reaching conclusions from very little research, or none at all. Your best shot is to explain research as a powerful risk mitigation tool. And: search for people whose priorities align with yours — people who value and see the impact of UX in their units. They would absolutely love to support your work because it also supports their work — and they will put up a good word for you if they only had known that you existed. ✤ Useful resources: UX Research Cheat Sheet, by Susan Farrell from NN/g (attached) https://lnkd.in/eUTHKWvF What Can You Do When You Have No Access To Users?, by H Locke https://lnkd.in/ewHEKhBS UX Research When You Can’t Talk To Users, by Chris Myhill https://lnkd.in/ez5-b6zf #ux #research

We all need to run research with non-users sometimes. Maybe you’re expanding to a new market, product, or audience. Or you’re using general pop panels because your customers just Do. Not. Respond. Recruiting is still a challenge, for almost everyone. Here are 5 great ways to recruit participants for your research: 🎮Online communities If you want to meet a group of fitness enthusiasts to try out your new fitness app, or find parents of teenagers for a fin-tech product, find those communities online first—try Facebook, Reddit, Instagram, etc. ✔️Start by googling your target audience and “community” (e.g., “UX research communities”). ✔️Participate in discussions, share relevant content, and politely introduce your research project. 🎮 Paid user panel tools UserTesting, Respondent, UserInterviews, and Askable are great options for this. You will have to be strict about screening to eliminate “professional testers”, and offer meaningful incentives. Recruitment agencies are also a great idea if you’re looking for more niche audiences. Ask researchers for references on communities like ReOps Slack to find the right agencies. 🎮 Run ads If you have some budget, ads can be a great way to draw out the right audience. Instead of looking for participants, let them come to you. While designing your ad, don’t put too much focus on the incentive—it can get you participants who are there just for the money. 🎮 Industry events Participate in industry events, conferences, and meetups where potential non-users are likely to gather. Use the time wisely—do quick coffee chats and informal interviews. End the chat with the ask to follow up: “Is it okay if we continue our conversation on [X] another time? I’m running some research on the topic and your insights have been invaluable!” Don’t forget to mention the incentives! 🎮 All hail Linkedin There’s nothing like LinkedIn for participants in B2B! Send personalized messages and explain why you reached out to them. Not everyone will respond, but some folks will be open to quick chats as long as you provide flexible scheduling & explain why their inputs matter. I’ve put together a detailed guide on how to successfully recruit non-user research participants. It’s full of wisdom, and includes: ✅Detailed reviews of popular user panel tools ✅Expert tips on recruiting participants yourself ✅Message templates for potential participants ✅A cute Canva template for user recruiting ads! Read the guide here: https://bit.ly/4blFZgm Do you struggle to recruit a specific audience? Tell us more in the comments! You never know who can help #research #ux #usertesting

If you work in UX research, you know that your insights are only as good as the sample you collect. Perfect random samples are rare in our field, but that doesn’t mean you have to settle for low-quality data. The real challenge is balancing speed and cost with validity, and there are practical ways to do it. The first step is understanding your sampling options. In an ideal world, you would run a simple random sample where every user has an equal chance of being picked. If you have a clean customer database or panel, you can randomize IDs and draw participants this way, but it’s costly and rare in UX. A more accessible variation is systematic sampling: sort your list randomly and invite every 10th or 20th user. It works if the list is truly random, but beware of hidden patterns like chronological ordering that can skew results. For teams that need reliable subgroup comparisons - say you want both iOS and Android users represented - stratified sampling is a better fit. Divide your population into meaningful segments, get the actual proportion for each, and sample within those groups. And when you’re dealing with a geographically dispersed or very large audience, cluster or multistage sampling helps reduce cost by selecting groups like cities first, then sampling users within them, though you need a larger sample to maintain precision. Most UX teams can’t do pure probability sampling, so they rely on non-probability methods. These include convenience samples of whoever responds, quota sampling where you fill set targets like a 50/50 device split, snowball recruiting through referrals for niche users, and in-product intercepts that capture feedback right in context. They’re fast and cost-effective but come with high bias risks. The good news is you can make these work better: use simple quotas to make sure you hear from new and power users, recruit through more than one channel so you don’t only reach forum regulars, trigger intercepts in ways that don’t miss those who drop off, and always document who you didn’t reach, like churned users. For large-scale or high-stakes projects, a hybrid approach combines the best of both worlds. You might recruit 500 people from a random sample and add 1,500 from an opt-in panel, then use propensity modeling and weighting to align the opt-in group to the random group. This balances cost and statistical validity. Weighting in general is a powerful tool to align your sample to known population benchmarks like census data or internal analytics. Post-stratification weights on key cells such as age by gender, and raking iteratively aligns marginal distributions when you don’t have full cross-cell data. Weighting adds variance, so it’s important to calculate your effective sample size for proper margins of error rather than assuming your raw n reflects precision.

An org in the public benefits space reached out to 15 people for work requirements research calls and didn’t get any responses. They then turned to AI research. Participant recruitment is super hard, especially in communities experiencing homelessness or food insecurity. I’m sharing some (human) approaches I’ve seen work in government, and would love any additional ideas from folks. 1. Increase the honorarium from $10. 2. Instead of pre-scheduling participants, head out into the community to literally meet folks where they are. In DC, MLK library and McDonalds have been effective. 3. Coordinate with local community groups that thoughtfully serve the populations and ask for their advice/partnership. For example, bread for the city in DC — could you attend one of their distribution events? How could you support and learn from their clients? 4. Follow up on questions / correspondence already submitted to government partners. For example, if someone had asked a question previously, following up with them to see if they’d be willing to help with a design project to help other people in their position. 5. Team up with an org trying to research a similar population and stack questions so you have half the recruitment effort and can learn from each other. 6. Hire employees that have lived experience in these communities. More people are finding themselves in these circumstances every day. What am I missing Dana Chisnell Gina Kim Mollie R. Natalie Moore Ron Bronson? What are some things you would try before having AI conduct these kinds of interviews?

One of the fun parts of starting a new job is getting to ask “Why” a thousand times a day.* Why is this our strategy? Why is this our target customer? Why choose this problem? Why do we believe this market is big enough? Why do we believe our solution is differentiated? Lean Startup Canvas is a handy tool to remind ourselves of the kinds of questions to ask. If there are questions about revenue model, market size, or similar “what needs to be true for this to be big enough, and how confident are we that those assumptions can become true one day”, I like to model out all of those assumptions, and then see which we need to de-risk.* If there are questions about what customer we want to target, what Jobs To Be Done we want them to hire us for, what would make us a differentiated solution, I like to turn to generative research. This starts with recruiting 6-10 people who 1) have no prior relationship with me or anyone at the company, 2) are likely to represent the kind of customer we would focus on. Then, we should interview them with open ended questions that stay within the context of our focus area. And don’t sleep on the power of ethnographic research, diary studies, card sorting exercises, etc. Let them take us to where they want to go, what’s on their mind, what feelings do they have. What we’re hunting for are flare ups of emotion that can reveal a worthy pain point. These are subtle — an edge to their voice that lasts half a sentence, a big sigh or rolling of the eyes, a shaking of the head. We’re fully present during these interviews, because these moments are easy to miss. When we see those moments, we pounce. “Can you say more about that?” “How does that make you feel?” “How do you deal with that today?” These are the nuggets of gold that can lead us to a problem worthy of Product Market Fit, if we can validate that the problem is 1) wide spread enough, 2) solvable in a differentiated way, and 3) can be monetized sufficiently. What we absolutely must not do is pretend we’re doing generative research but actually we’re user testing solutions we already have in mind. Evaluative user testing is a great and under-utilized tool, but it’s not the same thing. If we go looking for proof that we are right, we’re pretty likely to find it because human brains are great at confirmation bias. Don’t: “What if I presented you with this solution, that could do x, y, z. Would you use it?” Do: “You mentioned [problem hypothesis]. Tell me about the last time [problem hypothesis] happened. What was it like? What did you do? How did it make you feel?” We’ll get to the solution design soon enough, but until we have confidence and clarity about what problem we want to solve, any solutions we do build are hard to evaluate.* —————— *If you’re interested in reading the footnotes as well as my work-in-progress thoughts (today: “good and cheap” > “great and expensive”), sign up for my free newsletter: https://lnkd.in/g44P3_rB

When product teams plan discovery, attention usually goes to the script, the questions, and the insights we hope to uncover. But one of the most critical pieces often gets less attention: recruiting. [Side note: if you aren’t even talking to your users and are outlining problems or Jobs-to-Be-Done with just internal ideas, you have a bigger problem.] When uncovering Jobs-to-Be-Done, it’s not “talk to whoever will talk to me.” It’s about talking to the right people, thoughtfully and purposefully. If you’re following "switch” interviews (Bobby Moesta), your starting point is a specific decision. Say, buying a car. You want people who recently made that switch. Not last week (honeymoon phase) or three years ago (fuzzy memory), but in the window where they can recall what pushed them to act, what tradeoffs they made, and how they feel about that decision now. The ODI (Tony Ulwick) approach is more around understanding the steps someone goes through to accomplish a job, what outcomes they want, and where their experience falls short. So you're talking to them about a recent experience, how they're typically executing that job. Regardless of which approach you’re using, good recruiting matters. A few tips: ✅ Talk to your actual audience. Not proxies. Not people who “know” them. Directly to them. And be specific about who this is. ✅ Define key attributes that could influence their experience. For example, if you're focused on healthcare administrators it could be the type of organization, size, primary patient population, etc. ✅ Aim for variation across those attributes. You don’t need 50 interviews typically. With ~10 thoughtfully selected participants, you can uncover a lot with a focused audience and recruiting. ✅ Budget for incentives. Depending on the audience, that might be $50 or $250+. ✅ Use a screener. Especially outside your known network, people will try to game the system and waste your time. ✅ Use calendar tools. Avoid the back-and-forth. Let people book directly. They will do it more often. Recruiting the wrong participants won’t just waste your time. It can lead your strategy in the wrong direction entirely. In terms of where to find audiences User Interviews and Respondent have been great tools. I've also used social media but your screener has to be very tight. And I'd recommend a recruiter if your audience is very niche or super busy. Anything else I missed?

Happy Global Focus Group Day! What you should know to make them more successful for you: 1. Focus groups are only one step in the research journey. Others include: - Surveys (quantitative) - Analytics - User experience (e.g., UX, UI, CX) 2. Focus groups are qualitative (small scale relying on humans), focused on WHY and HOW. 3. A focus group is usually a 1.5 hour session (online or in person) with 6-8 people, guided in discussion by a moderator. 4. They are called focus groups. - Not focus tests, surveys, or interviews. 5. Best practice is to do at least two sessions of 1.5-hours each with 6-8 people per session. - Total of 12-14 people for 2 sessions. 6. If you have a wide range of demographics or psychographics, make sure that you do at least 2 sessions per each cohort. - This can get extensive and expensive. 7. Unlike quantitative research (e.g., surveys), they are not predictive. - Ask yourself, would you make major business decisions based on what 12 people said in a room? 8. There are four key components to a great focus group: - Recruitment 👯👯👯👯👯 - Discussion guide 📄 - Moderator 🤓 - Clients who know what they want (i.e., goals and objectives) 🎯 9. Do not skimp on recruitment efforts, cost, or incentives. - Thoughtful, engaging, and articulate participants are key. - Remember the old programming adage: Garbage In, Garbage Out. 10. Always over-recruit (+3 people or more per group), especially in North America and Europe. - If you schedule 6 people, and only 3 show up, it's probably not going to result in deep insights, regardless of the moderator's talent. 11. A great moderator is like a great host at a dinner party. - They will keep the conversation going, be able to ensure that your elderly uncle stays in line, that VIP feels special, and of course, shut down that "alpha dog" that thinks they know more about your product than you do. 12. The discussion guide is just that. - A great moderator will adjust to the flow of the conversation, improvise, and add questions based on threads of discussion. 13. As a client, know EXACTLY what you want to get out of the research. - Make sure you are clear with goals and objectives and communicate HOW you will use the results. 14. Always pre-game. - Go over the guide before a session. - This helps the moderator understand the "must have's" (e.g., a question that your boss wants answered). 15. Stay in contact. - Whether it's online or in-person, the moderator should take cues and suggestions from you and integrate them into the discussion. 16. Debrief. - Do this at the end of every day. This keeps the research aligned. 17. Request a timely deliverable. - I do a topline the next day, with the key findings in a week. (YMMV) - Don't wait too long or the research goes "stale." Have fun! Listening to people talk about your product/service is a learning opportunity! #focusgroups #surveys #marketresearch #videogames #ux #genz

📝 New personal blog post: I just published a practical guide to one of the most overlooked challenges for early-stage startups — recruiting quality user research participants when you're bootstrapping the process. At CodeYam, we've learned (sometimes the hard way) that who you talk to matters as much as what you ask them. I've shared our complete playbook including: - How to define who you actually need to interview - Where to find the right people without burning through your runway - Our actual screening survey and email templates - Practical tips for avoiding participation fraud (yes, that's a thing!) This isn't theoretical. This the exact process we're using today as we refine how we describe our software simulation tools for developers. If you're working on early validation or have been frustrated by low-quality research feedback, I hope our lessons learned can save you some headaches. Read the full post here: https://lnkd.in/gzvxrgue What recruitment channels have worked best for your user research? Would love to hear your experiences in the comments! #startups #userresearch #productdevelopment #founderstories

I was recently asked to brainstorm on some of the thorniest UXR challenges: recruitment of children and international participants on a budget. It’s thorny but there are ways to tackle these. 🧒 Recruiting kids  Recruiting kids for UXR requires a combination of practicality, creativity, and compliance with legal / ethical standards. ✅ Start Local ➡️ Reach out to your own networks: children of researchers, friends, and family (yes, it’s a biased sample, but great for early-stage learning). ➡️ Work with local schools, both public and private. Admins and teachers may be open to partnerships, especially if it’s an educational opportunity. ➡️ Connect with youth orgs: after-school programs (e.g., YMCA), summer camps, local libraries. ✅ Expand using digital channels ➡️ Use social media, especially parent-focused Facebook groups (like Mountain View Moms) and LinkedIn, to reach parents who might be open to involving their kids. ➡️ Consider remote-friendly approaches: Zoom-based sessions, parent-mediated interviews, kid-friendly surveys (can use free platforms if on a low budget) ✅ Use panels for larger-scale research For larger-scale or more diverse research, and if you have funding, consider working with panels or vendors specializing in youth participants: ➡️ UserTesting (ages 13–17) ➡️ Panelpolls ➡️ Qualtrics ➡️ RAND Youth Panels 📜 Complying with legal and ethical standards ➡️ If your research involves digital products or data collection, ensure compliance with the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) in the US and GDPR-K in Europe ➡️ IRB reviews are required for research that aims to produce generalizable scientific knowledge. Most UX research doesn't fall in this category and doesn't require IRB. However, children are a vulnerable population and a robust consent process must be employed. ➡️ Using a detailed consent form for parents (examples on NNgroup.com) and an age-appropriate language to explain the research to children and obtain their agreement in addition to parental consent. ➡️ Don’t forget copyright NDAs for any art or creative work kids produce. 🌍 Recruiting participants internationally Recruiting internationally can also be challenging, especially in countries that don’t have UX research infrastructure in place or if your budget is tight. ✅ Start locally if you are on a tight budget ➡️ Tap into friends, family, and colleagues from the target countries. Many of us have diverse personal and professional networks. ➡️ Look for country-based employee groups, expat communities, and local international schools in your area. ✅ Scale  using digital channels ➡️ Use social media and expat groups to reach people online. ➡️ Most large survey panel providers have panels in countries around the world. Surveys work well when designed thoughtfully and tested with native speakers. 👇 Share more ideas for kids and global recruitment in the comments! #ux #uxresearch #userresearch #userexperience #surveys