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User Interviews

Creating an experience requires understanding the users of that experience. If you’re designing an experience to fulfill your own needs, you probably already have a pretty good understanding of the user. If not, user interviews can help to determine who your users are, as well as their motivations, attitudes, struggles, and needs. For this reason, it’s important to talk to users early in the process so that the foundational decisions are made with actual humans in mind.

Because user interviews are such a powerful tool in guarding against the team’s biases in the decision-making process, they should be conducted thoroughly and documented in a way that’s easily shared, consumed, and referenced throughout the design of the experience. They might be used to guide design decisions or to balance the demands from business and technology stakeholders. You might continue to conduct user interviews throughout the design process, rather than just at the beginning, so that your understanding of the user evolves alongside the refinement of your product or service.