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Discovery Customer Interviews
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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.
You have already established that you are in need of a Customer Interview for Discovery.
Let's get into it!
how does the method work?
Before starting into creating an Interview guide for your Discovery Interview go through these questions and prompts to set the correct base:
Purpose:
Explore the unknown to understand your customers’ needs, behaviors, pain points, and aspirations. Discover opportunities, problems, and unmet needs that exist in your customers’ lives or workflows and avoid trying to confirm any preconceived solutions or assumptions.
Approach
Ask open-ended questions to elicit experiences and opinions and focus on the customer's reality: “Tell me about the last time…” or “Describe a situation where…”. Listen for unspoken frustrations, workarounds, and desires.
Typical Questions
- “What are your biggest challenges when doing [relevant activity]?”
- “Can you describe a recent experience related to [your topic]?”
- “What do you wish was different about how you currently handle [relevant problem]?”
Best Practices
Do not influence the interviewee’s answers and remain neutral and curious but verify your understanding by paraphrasing and asking for confirmation. Whenever you notice hints of frustration or workarounds: Dig deeper!
Practical Preparation
Set your learning objective (What do you not yet know?) and prepare open-ended questions and leave room for surprises. Interview diverse users to uncover a broad range of needs.
Step by Step Guide
It is essential to prepare an interview guide ahead of time. Never enter an interview unprepared. Your interview guide acts as a frame, keeping the dialogue focused on your goal. A solid guide usually follows this structure:
Intro:
Welcome your interviewee and appreciate their time.
Personal Information:
Collect basic context like name, age, and title.
Personal Experience and Behaviour:
- Ask questions that surface pain points
- “What’s your biggest pain point with [relevant activity]?"
Personal Values and Needs:
- Explore what matters to them by prompting
- “What’s important to you when you are doing [relevant activity]?”
Additional Questions:
- Give space for anything you might have missed
- “Is there anything else I should have asked?"
Outro:
Thank them again for their commitment.
Pay attention to the logistics:
- Each interview should typically last 30–45 minutes.
- Aim to conduct 3–6 interviews within a segment for robust results.
- Assign specific roles in the session: one person acts as the interviewer, another as observer/notetaker.Why is it ideal and important to conduct an interview as a team of two? With that one member can focus on interviewing, asking the right questions and building the relationship whereas the other member can pay attention to details and take helpful notes that provide the base for the action plan afterwards. If you are conducting an interview on your own or you need some support while note-taking feel free to make use of AI tools but make sure to give a heads up to the interviewee if you want to record the session.
- The ideal environment is online with the camera on or in person, fostering connection and trust.
Tips
- If something is unclear, ask away. It is better to repeat the question during the interview instead guessing afterwards or having to read between the lines.
- Above all, build a trusting environment where participants feel safe, there are no wrong answers. This supports open and honest sharing, which is key to meaningful insights.
- Be careful with the time given to you by the interviewee. Come well prepared and avoid stretching the meeting over the scheduled time.
- Stay relaxed if something does not go the way as intended. We are all human and with a smile on your face everything will work out.
method canvas
Use canvas
in Miro
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pdf file
