User interviews are a fantastic method to uncover information about your users’ experiences, backgrounds, needs, and desires. That being said, writing interview questions requires some thought and attention. Questions that might be fit for a questionnaire are not always appropriate for a user interview. And poorly constructed questions can confuse participants or lead to inaccurate reporting of thoughts, feelings, needs, and desires and, hence, result in invalid insights. This article highlights 6 common mistakes in drafting interview questions and suggests how to improve them.
#1 Starting with Questions that Should Be Asked in a Screener Survey
Some new interviewers want to know many facts about their participants and end up with an interview guide full of closed questions. For example, imagine that we’re conducting research on people’s experiences cooking at home. It can be tempting to ask lots of questions like these at the beginning of your interview:
- How often do you cook?
- Do you have any dietary restrictions?
- Have you tried a meal-kit service before?
- How often do you shop for ingredients?
In the context of a user interview, the questions above would be considered closed questions, in that there are only a few possible responses to each of these questions. (Of course, some participants might interpret closed questions as open-ended questions and offer further explanation). The problem with having many closed questions like these at the beginning of the interview is that they don’t allow participants to share stories about their experiences and they hamper your ability to build rapport with your participant. The other issue with asking closed questions instead of open-ended ones is that you don’t learn things that you didn’t think to ask!
If it’s important to ask these closed questions to direct the focus of the interview, then incorporate them into your screener questionnaire. The responses will help you tailor your interview guide or understand where emphasis should be placed in the interview. Remember that for any user research study, you have a strict budget for time spent with your participants. (And for unmoderated methods like surveys, users will spend very little time on your study.) Therefore, you should allocate this limited time to the most important research questions and to collecting data that couldn’t be gathered more easily with simpler methods.
There’s nothing wrong with asking some closed questions in your interviews — in fact, they’re needed to get detail and provide clarification into things participants are sharing with you. But it's much better to start by asking open-ended questions that allow participants to share some of their experiences. Such questions also set the stage for a less structured communication style and prime participants to later share details. Example questions include:
- Tell me about a time when you cooked a meal for yourself.
- Tell me about the last time you cooked something.
- Tell me about a time when you cooked a new recipe.
#2 Asking Only Questions About Typical Behaviors
Another mistake some new interviewers make is to ask only about typical behavior. For example, consider the following questions:
- How do you normally decide what to eat?
- Which utensils do you typically use?
- What’s your typical meal-preparation process?
Asking only about typical behavior prevents you from gaining in-depth, reliable information — what people typically do (if there is such a thing) and what they think they typically do may be different things! Moreover, responses to such questions will not capture participants’ behaviors that are very much dependent on contextual factors. It’s much better to ask about specific examples than to ask them to describe what they think is typical.
That being said, it’s often customary for the interviewer to introduce a grand-tour question at the beginning of the interview. Note that this question does ask about typical behavior. Some examples of a grand-tour question are:
- Walk me through what a typical day in your home looks like.
- Walk me through what a typical meal looks like in your home.
- Tell me about a typical day in your office.
A grand-tour question at the beginning of an interview is like setting the scene for a story: we have a preview of the landscape that we can use to build upon throughout the interview. Once we’ve asked the grand-tour question, we move on and ask about specific examples, like those we’ve covered already in #1.
#3 Asking Hypothetical Questions
Sometimes interviewers introduce questions that ask the participant to imagine a future experience, choice, or situation, and ask how the participant might respond. These are hypothetical questions. Consider the questions below:
- If you chose to use a meal-kit service, why might that be?
- If there was a product that could help you make new meals from scratch, would you use it?
The problem with this kind of question is that people are bad at predicting their future behavior or choices — but they’ll likely have a good answer for you! If we want to understand people’s real choices, desires, and needs, we need to ask about real experiences and choices — not imagined future ones. This might mean recruiting the right people: people who have had the experiences you are looking to learn about.
#4 Using Clarifying Questions that Introduce an Interpretation
Often, when we hear users describe their past actions, thoughts, or feelings, it’s tempting to start hypothesizing out loud why they said or did something, like in the following examples:
- Did you choose that meal because it was easy to prepare?
- Was it to save time that you ordered the meal-kit service?
- Was that because you liked the website that you chose that recipe?
While these questions seem fairly innocent, especially when the hypotheses all seem reasonable, they are, in fact, leading the participants towards a certain response. For this reason, avoid asking questions that use the word ‘because.’ When people are presented with leading questions, they’re more likely to agree with the question or succumb to some kind of priming effect. Instead, it’s much better to ask:
- Tell me why you chose that meal.
- What made you decide to order the meal kit service?
- What made you choose that recipe?
#5 Asking Compound Questions
Compound questions (or double-barreled questions) contain more than one question at the same time. For example:
- Tell me what you decided to cook, and why.
- Tell me about your journey into cooking and your experience at culinary school.
- What things made you interested in cooking and good at it?
While these questions are common in surveys, they’re not a good idea to ask in interviews. This is because participants have to store the question in their working memory while they answer part of the question, which is hard to do. Participants may incorrectly remember the question, or only remember part of it. Your participant may also feel silly asking you what the original question was. Instead, keep questions short and concise, and don’t ask people to tell you what they did and why; that’s what followup and probing questions are for!
#6 Asking Ambiguous Questions
Sometimes, interviewers ask questions that are so broad that they become ambiguous, causing participants to interpret them incorrectly or ask for clarification. For example:
- Can you share with me the environment that you cook in?
- Tell me about your cooking habits.
- Tell me about your cooking experience.
These questions can result in participants responding with questions like “What do you mean by the environment?”, “Do you mean how frequently I cook, or how I cook?”, “Do you mean how much experience I have, or how much I like cooking?”.
When devising questions, it’s important to think about how they could be interpreted. Taking time to pilot your interview guide with a participant can also help you understand if the questions you’re asking are interpreted incorrectly or need clarification.
Summary
Devising strong interview questions makes a lot of difference in the resulting data we collect. When in doubt, pilot your interviews to make sure you’re gathering useful data and your questions are understood correctly.
To learn more about mastering interviews, take our full-day course, User Interviews, or our 5-day course, Qualitative Research Series.
