A couple of weeks ago, I explored how user interviews can help with your discovery efforts. One of the key messages was the questions you ask will go a long way to determining how effective your user interviews are.

You need to know what you’re trying to find out, and you need to ask people questions about what they actually do, not what they think they might do.

You want stories, not predictions.

And you may have read that newsletter and said “sounds like a great idea. An example would be handy right about now.”

Ok. Here you go.

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Good interview questions work in surveys

Did you take the survey yet?

No? I’ll wait.

Ok. What did you notice about the questions?

I tried to word them to get you to answer what you do (So you pay to subscribe to any of these newsletters?) rather than predict what you would do (Would you pay to subscribe to a newsletter?).

I also asked a question to find out why, but again why you took a particular action, not why you think you would or would not do something.

We’ll see what results I get, but I suspect asking the questions this way will provide more meaningful results. It’ll also reduce the chances that people will lie to me.

I didn’t mean you, of course.

Surveys work well alongside user interviews.

User interviews can be time consuming, so you’re only going to talk to a few people. It makes sense to supplement those user interviews with a survey to get feedback from more people.

You may want to do the survey first to get a broad picture about what folks are doing, then use the user interviews to dig more into why.

Of course, to make sure people respond to your survey, you’ll want to keep it short so you’ll need to be real clear on what you want to find out, so your research question is important as well.

I’m going that route with this survey by opening the option for people to let me know if they’d like to discuss further, but not requiring that.

If you’ve got feedback from surveys and interviews, I’d love to hear about your experience.

And if you haven’t taken the survey yet, now’s a great time to take it now.

Thanks for reading

Thanks again for reading InsideProduct.

If you have any comments or questions about the newsletter, or there’s anything you’d like me to cover, just reply to this email.

Talk to you next time,

Kent J. McDonald
Founder | KBP.Media