Customer Interviews – Discovery & Validation
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Customer interviews are a structured way to gain insights that help you create better products and services.
The main reason for conducting interviews is to truly understand your customers’ needs, pain points, and wishes. By gathering this knowledge, you can ensure that what you build will be genuinely useful for your customers, rather than relying on assumptions or guesswork.
Why is this Warum ist das für Innovation wichtig? for innovation
People often mistake customer interviews for simple conversations, but this method is about creating a clear and structured way to uncover what really matters to users.
The customer interview method is designed to help teams truly understand customers’ needs, pain points, and wishes, forming the essential foundation for designing products and services that are useful and relevant. By talking directly to customers, teams avoid guesswork and ground their ideas in real user insights. A well-planned customer interview doesn't just collect opinions but it ensures that the right problems are surfaced, common ground is created among team members, and all subsequent steps in the innovation process are focused and effective. This approach empowers teams to generate meaningful ideas, align on priorities, and drive projects forward with confidence that the direction is genuinely inspired by the user’s perspective.
As the goal of the interview differs based on the phase in the innovation process you are currently in, you will find the two possible interview forms in the following as well as guidance on how to find the right one and ways to apply it for your project.
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Before starting to plan your customer interview it is crucial to define the following:
Do you and your team want to embark on an explorative discovery to understand the customer's needs, pain points, behavior and aspirations?
OR
Do you want to test assumptions of an already existing prototype or concept to collect concrete feedback?
How do you find out which type applies to your project?
Ask yourself the question: "Are we exploring or do we already have a solution (prototype/concept)?"
If you are currently exploring different options and want to find opportunities or problems you could tackle, developing a interview guide for a Discovery Interview would be your first choice.
If you already have a solution and are eager to refine or even pivot it, you are ready to get onto a Validation Interview.
In the following you will find the application for both forms to help you understand the approach and begin planning.
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