user-research

## Conduct User Interviews

### Interview Types
- **Exploratory**: Discover problems and needs (early stage, open-ended)
- **Evaluative**: Test a solution or prototype (have something to show)
- **Contextual**: Watch users in their environment (richest data)

### Interview Guide

**Warm-up (3 min)**
"Tell me about your role. What does a typical day look like?"
Goal: Build rapport, understand context.

**Current behavior (10 min)**
"Walk me through the last time you [did the relevant activity]."
"What tools did you use? What was the sequence?"
"What was the most frustrating part?"
"How long did it take?"

Follow-up probes:
- "Why did you choose to do it that way?"
- "What happened next?"
- "Can you show me?" (contextual interviews)

**Pain points (10 min)**
"What's the biggest challenge you face with [topic]?"
"Have you tried any workarounds?"
"What did you try that didn't work?"
"If this took 10x longer than it should, which part is the bottleneck?"

**Desired outcomes (5 min)**
"What would 'great' look like for you?"
"If you could change one thing, what would it be?"
"How would you know if this problem was solved?"

**Closing (2 min)**
"Is there anything I should have asked but didn't?"
"Who else should I talk to about this?"
"Would you be open to testing something we're building?"

### Interview Rules
1. **No leading questions**: ❌ "Don't you think X would be better?"
2. **Past behavior > future intent**: ❌ "Would you use..." ✅ "When was the last time you..."
3. **Silence is data**: Don't fill pauses — let them think
4. **Record with permission**: Take notes AND record (you'll miss things in real-time)
5. **5 interviews = 80% of insights**: Diminishing returns after 5-8 per segment

## Create Research-Based Personas

Personas are fictional characters based on REAL research data.
Not: your imagined ideal user. Based on: interview patterns.

### Persona Template

**Name**: "Operational Olga"
**Role**: Operations Manager at a 30-person agency
**Demographics**: 32, 5 years in ops, manages 3 teams

**Goals**:
- Reduce time spent on manual reporting (currently 6 hrs/week)
- Ensure nothing falls through the cracks during client handoffs
- Have visibility into team workload without asking for status updates

**Frustrations**:
- "I spend Monday mornings rebuilding the same spreadsheet every week"
- "I only find out about blockers in the Thursday standup — too late"
- "Our tools don't talk to each other — Asana, Slack, Google Sheets, email"

**Current tools**: Asana (project management), Google Sheets (reporting), Slack
**Tech comfort**: Comfortable with SaaS tools, not technical enough for APIs
**Decision process**: Evaluates tools herself, gets budget approval from COO

**Key quote** (from interview):
"I don't need another tool. I need the tools I have to actually work together."

**Behavioral patterns** (from data):
- Logs in 3x/day, mostly on mobile during commute
- Exports data to spreadsheets weekly
- Primary workflow: check status → identify blockers → reassign work

### Rules for Good Personas
- Based on interviews (minimum 5), not assumptions
- Include behavioral patterns, not just demographics
- Update quarterly as you learn more
- Maximum 3-4 personas — more means you haven't segmented enough
- Include anti-personas (who you're NOT building for)

## Design Effective Surveys

### When to Survey (vs Interview)
- **Survey**: Validate at scale what you discovered in interviews
- **Interview**: Discover new insights you didn't know to ask about

Sequence: Interviews first → Survey to quantify → Interviews to deepen

### Survey Design Rules

1. **Under 5 minutes**: Response rates drop 50% after 5 minutes
2. **One topic per survey**: Don't combine satisfaction + feature requests + NPS
3. **Specific questions**: ❌ "How satisfied are you?" ✅ "How easy was it to complete [specific task]?"
4. **Avoid double-barreled**: ❌ "How fast and reliable is the product?" (those are two questions)
5. **Randomize options**: Prevent order bias on multiple choice
6. **Include "Other"**: Your options never cover everything

### Question Types by Goal

**Satisfaction**: "How would you rate your experience with [feature]?" (1-7 scale)
**Effort**: "How easy was it to [task]?" (CES — Customer Effort Score, 1-7)
**Loyalty**: "How likely are you to recommend to a colleague?" (NPS, 0-10)
**Priority**: "Rank these features by importance to your workflow" (forced ranking)
**Open-ended**: "What's the one thing you'd change?" (limit to 1-2 open questions)

### Sample Sizes
- Directional insight: 30-50 responses
- Statistically significant: 200+ responses
- Segment comparison: 100+ per segment

## Run Usability Tests

### Setup
- **Participants**: 5 per round (catches ~85% of issues)
- **Tasks**: 3-5 realistic scenarios
- **Method**: Think-aloud protocol ("narrate your thoughts as you go")
- **Recording**: Screen + face (tools: Lookback, UserTesting, Maze)

### Task Design
Write tasks as goals, not instructions:

❌ "Click the Settings icon, then go to Billing, then click Upgrade"
(This tests whether they can follow instructions, not whether the UI is usable)

✅ "You want to upgrade your account to the Pro plan. Please do that now."
(This tests whether they can figure out the path)

### What to Measure
- **Task completion rate**: % who finish without help
- **Time on task**: How long to complete (benchmark against target)
- **Errors**: Wrong clicks, backtracking, confusion points
- **Severity**: Is the issue a blocker (can't proceed) or an annoyance?
- **Satisfaction**: Post-task rating ("How easy was that?" 1-7)

### Severity Scale
- **Critical**: User cannot complete the task at all
- **Major**: User completes but with significant difficulty or errors
- **Minor**: User notices but works around it easily
- **Cosmetic**: User doesn't notice but it violates best practices

### After Testing
1. List all issues found, sorted by severity
2. For each issue: what happened, why, and recommended fix
3. Fix critical/major issues before launch
4. Test again after fixes (verification round)

We're launching a project management tool for remote design teams. Help me create a user interviews.

I've done 12 user interviews for our project management tool. Help me synthesize the findings into actionable personas.