A user interview is a structured or semi-structured one-on-one conversation with a person who is part of the target audience, designed to help you understand their needs, behaviors, motivations, and frustrations related to a particular product, service, or area.
The researcher prepares a research guide consisting of a list of questions or discussion topics, with the purpose of opening the conversation in a friendly and natural way. Usually, a discussion lasts between 30 and 60 minutes and takes place either face-to-face or online, focusing on the person’s real-life experience. Interviews can be exploratory (at the beginning of a project, to understand a particular area or problem) or evaluative (to test reactions to an existing concept, prototype, or solution).
Through these interviews, you can gain more context: why people do what they do, what they are actually trying to solve, where frustrations arise, and what solutions they come up with on their own. Unlike a survey, where you receive short answers to fixed questions, an interview leaves room for follow-up questions (“Why do you say that?”, “Can you give me an example?”), which can reveal things you did not anticipate.
In product development, user interviews are often the first step of a new project because, before designing a solution, the team wants to understand the real problem from the perspective of the people experiencing it. They are also used later in the process to validate design directions or to understand why a feature is not being used as expected.
To get a representative result, you typically need a set of 5–10 interviews per user segment, which is often enough to identify recurring patterns among users. The quality of the answers depends heavily on how the questions are formulated: leading questions (“Don’t you find it difficult to use?”) can bias the participant’s answers and distort the results.
