Top 6 Tips on Interviewing Users for Your Market Research

Interviewing your users is crucial for conducting your market research. If you conduct your interview properly, you can get sufficient data on people’s behaviour, wishes, needs, concerns, and even fears. 

Understanding your audience through market research transcription services is very efficient and convenient. Ideally, it should be done in person. In terms of the latest events, though, pandemics, and the fact that we all spend most of our time on the web, it is reasonable to interview and research your users remotely.

You can use a transcription website to make your interviews more convenient and bring the necessary results. It is still crucial to plan the interviews carefully and ensure that all information you get is accurate and not distorted. Not always do the interviewers manage to do this.

Many factors may affect the accuracy of the received data, so using the most proper methods for your research is a must.

Check the guide below and find out how to get the most of your user research in 2021. 

1. Ask the right questions

Before any interview, preparation is a must. Some improvisation is not bad, but in general, you should be ready and plan the questions to ask beforehand. There is no one-fits-all list of questions since everything depends on your niche.

Naturally, you have to keep your goals in mind. Build your questions based on what exactly you want to learn about your users’ behaviour and what results you want to receive. Here is a scheme that should help you build the questions properly:

• Intro questions;
• Topic-specific questions;
• Product-related questions. 

The first group of questions includes a general questionnaire that helps you understand the everyday life of your users. For example, what apps they usually use and for what purposes, what they do in life, etc. 

While asking topic-related questions, find out something that is focused on a particular problem. For example, how much time they spend completing a specific task or what their attitude to the topic is, etc.

Then, ask questions that concern your product. You need specific feedback on it. Based on your niche and product, ask whether they have used it and why what their experience with it is, etc. If you promote a podcast, channel, or website, you can ask whether your users prefer audio transcription or video transcription online, etc. 

2. Lead the conversation

Avoid interrogating your users. They don’t have to feel as if you gathered them to just ask specific questions and nothing more. Any user wants to be cared for. When you quickly overwhelm them with your product-related questions, they feel stressed and pressured. 

Instead, lead a conversation. Healthy dialogue is always good. People tend to answer open-ended questions with a bigger pleasure. Give them a chance to tell stories about their experience rather than simply using a question-answer scheme. Yes or no questions must be avoided.

For example, instead of asking, “Was your experience with human-generated transcripts positive?” offer something like “Tell us more about what your experience with text transcriptions was like” or “Share your experience with us,” etc. Then you can put more specific questions to get deeper into the topic you are interested in. 

3. Interview a perfect number of people

How many people should you interview to get the right data? It depends on your niche, your goals, and your target audience. The bigger your business is, the wider range of goods you sell, the more people should be interviewed.

For example, if your podcast with video transcription is listened to by thousands of people, getting the opinions of just two or four users won’t be efficient. You should then broaden the range of your interviewees and get feedback from as many users as possible. 

4. Interview the right people

Not only asking the right questions but also interviewing the right audience is crucial to get the desired results. If you conduct market research of an app or website, you should pose questions to people who have already used them. They are your target audience, and only these users can give you the knowledge you need so much.

You may wonder where to find those people. Your app or website definitely has social media accounts. Post ads there and arrange questionnaires. Users adore such interactions. Of course, it works when you have a decent number of followers. To make sure your post reaches as many followers as possible, boost the post.

If you do not have many followers, getting good feedback is impossible, but still, you might get some replies. You can also have a mail list of your customers and send them questionnaires on emails. Boosting your post on Facebook won’t cost more than $5, but it will bring you decent feedback within just 48 hours.

If you are researching something else and your interview is not very product-oriented, you can also get feedback from people who are not using your services yet. For example, from your potential future customers. 

5. Record your interview

If you are interviewing your audience, not on social media but live, it is very helpful to record your interviews. You cannot ask questions and note the answers down all the time. It is time-consuming and distracting. No matter how well you do, you definitely fail to do one of the two tasks.

Recording an interview allows keeping track of what your users say, first of all, and listening to it afterwards whenever you need it. Apart from hearing what your users say, you can pay attention to your own mistakes. This is a good way of self-improvement. 

You can avoid the same mistakes next time. If listening to the interview is not convenient for you each time, you can simply use an automated transcription service and have your interviews recorded as text. It is one of the most efficient ways of getting back to the results of your interviews whenever necessary.

6. Analyze the results

Each time you get back to your interview, organize and analyze the information received. You arranged this interview with some purpose, didn’t you? It means you should reach it. Use spreadsheet tools to organize the data. This way, you can see the responses of your interviewees in front of you and compare them.

If you see issues — for example, if someone is not happy with your product or services — create a list of actions to solve them. You conduct your research with the aim of improving your services, don’t you? Then do it. Analyze, spot the issues, and create an action plan to fix them. Only this way, your interview will be efficient enough!