How To Interview Your Users And Get Useful Feedback

(This is guest post by Garrett Moon, Founder of TodayMade.
It’s not enough just to talk to customers. You have to know how.
In this post, Garrett shares his lessons learned for crafting effective customer interviews.
Enjoy…
-Ash)

When my business partner and I drafted our first outline for our next startup venture, we knew that we were onto something pretty exciting. The existing market had little to offer in terms of a great editorial calendar for blogging, and we felt that our unique approach would resonate with users. Despite our excitement, we wanted to validate our idea. We started gathering feedback through user interviews.

One of the lessons I learned after killing my first product was that I needed to pay better attention to how I was gathering feedback. That experience showed me that I had a fundamental misunderstanding on how to actually go about getting good feedback.

With the new product, I vowed to double my efforts and do it right. I bought the book Interviewing Users by Steve Portigal and studied the art of interviewing. The investment in that book was one of the key ingredients to a successful launch. Even more importantly, it is something that anyone can duplicate.

Fast-forward to today, you’ll hear me say that there is nothing more energizing and useful than interviewing your users. As a born introvert, it took me some time to understand and accept this, but learning to get over my own inadequacies and give people a call made a huge difference in the amount and the quality of feedback that we received.

Not only were we able to make connections with potential customers, but we were also about to understand their true needs. Interviewing is an art, though, and you must approach it with reverence.

Interviewing Tip #1: Stop Sounding Like An Inventor

As an entrepreneur, it is actually somewhat counter-intuitive to conduct a user interview. Deep inside almost every starter is a little bit of salesmen, but this is counterproductive when collecting user feedback. Conducting an interview doesn’t call for a sales pitch. We have to be in it for the information.

A classic example of this is when an interviewee asks for a specific feature that they would like you to include. The salesperson inside of us wants to pounce on that idea and let the user know that it is something we are considering. This is our instinct, but it is not the best way to gather feedback.

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