User interviews are a valuable way to get real data that improves your product, service, or customer experience. But you can’t just show up to a customer call and hope for the best: to get the most out of your user interviews, you need to ask the right questions.
Whether you’re undertaking user research, developing a new product, or looking to improve your user experience (UX) design, the perfect user interview question can unlock a whole host of insights and lead to actionable improvements for your business.
Read on to discover:
Use Hotjar Engage to automate the entire user research process, so you can focus on asking the right questions—and turn answers into actions.
The opportunities for user interviews are almost endless. After all, what aspect of your business can’t be improved with insights from your target market?
When done right, user interviews are solution-focused, customer-centric, and empathetic, making them an ideal user research method for anyone who wants to stay close to their customers. But in order to get actionable data, it’s crucial to have a specific goal in mind for each interview.
Here are just a few examples of scenarios where user interviews shine, and some research questions to ask for each one.
🔥 Already using Hotjar? You're probably familiar with Heatmaps, Recordings, Feedback, and Surveys, but did you know you can connect with your users on an even deeper level with user interviews?
Hotjar Engage lets you easily schedule, run, and analyze user interviews, giving you another level of comprehensive insights that empower you to make customer-centric decisions.
What it is: concept testing is a method of evaluating early-stage product, service, campaign, or project ideas to understand whether a concept is viable and what improvements you should make. It involves showing a prototype (or prototypes) of your concept to interview participants and gathering feedback.
How user interviews help, and when to use them: concept testing happens early in the development process. The goal is to get valuable feedback before investing significant resources, then use this feedback to validate assumptions and nail down your direction. For example, if you’re undergoing a rebrand, you could show participants three versions of your new logo and branding and ask them which concept they prefer.
User interview questions to ask for concept testing:
⏳ Need an idea validated ASAP? Start with a quick concept testing survey to gather immediate feedback from a wide range of users. Then, once you’ve gathered initial feedback on your concepts, schedule user interviews to get more detailed insights and understand why they do or don’t resonate.
Use surveys to quickly test and validate your concepts, then dive deeper into the feedback with user interviews
What it is: market research is the process of gathering and analyzing information to help you better understand your target market.
How user interviews help, and when to use them: market research is especially crucial when launching a new business or offering (such as a new product, feature, or service). However, it can be done at any time to ensure you consistently meet your target audience’s ever-evolving needs.
User interview questions to ask for market research:
📋 Did you know? Hotjar has a survey template for that. 🤓
Use our market research survey template to kick-start your user interview process and gather a range of feedback from a specific cohort. Once you’ve analyzed your results, follow up with specific users to dig deeper into their responses with one-to-one user interviews.
Use our survey template to get valuable initial feedback for your market research—or borrow the questions to use in one-to-one user interviews (we won’t tell 🤫)
What it is: product development is the process of, well, developing a new product. This can be a digital product, such as those created by software-as-a-service (SaaS) businesses, or a physical product, like a new flavor of cat food.
How user interviews help, and when to use them: once you’ve done your market research and concept testing and you’re in the product development phase, continue to conduct user interviews to stay on the right track. Product development user interviews are typically done pre-launch, while the product is still in beta, but they can also be useful post-launch and as part of a continuous improvement strategy.
User interview questions to ask for product development:
📋 There’s a Hotjar survey template for that, too!
Take inspiration from our product feedback survey, feature prioritization survey, and product market fit survey templates. Pick and mix from the suggested questions to build your own bank of questions for your product development user interviews.
You can even use the beta feedback survey to recruit new beta users for upcoming feature or product launches, then arrange user interviews in Engage to follow up and gather more detailed feedback.
Use Surveys to get beta testers for new features or products, then follow up with in-depth user interviews to get more detailed product development insights
What it is: usability testing is a method of testing the functionality of a website, app, or other product by observing how easy (or difficult) it is for users to complete tasks.
How user interviews help, and when to use them: it’s helpful to run usability tests before launching a new feature or product, but they’re just as vital if your session recordings or heatmaps surface issues that could be attributed to poor usability or UX. These include a sudden drop-off in conversions or a lot of rage clicks (i.e. repeated clicks in specific areas or on certain elements that usually indicate user frustration).
User interview questions to ask for usability testing:
🔥 If you’re using Hotjar: combine session recordings and heatmaps with user interviews to get both quantitative and qualitative data for your usability tests.
Use session recordings to see exactly what (anonymized) users see and do on your site, including where they encounter bugs or get frustrated. Filter your recordings to quickly identify broken elements, investigate drop-off activity, or compare variants in an A/B test.
You can also use heatmaps to identify areas of engagement, rage clicks, or content that gets overlooked.
With these insights in mind, run targeted user interviews to hear your users’ thought processes and direct feedback—allowing you to understand not only what they did on your site, but why they did things that way.
Filter your recordings by rage clicks to watch sessions where users got frustrated, then build your usability testing interview questions around these areas to help you better understand the issues
What it is: customer satisfaction describes how happy people are with a company’s products, services, and overall customer experience.
How user interviews help, and when to use them: customer satisfaction is often measured using a customer satisfaction (CSAT) survey or a Net Promoter Score® (NPS®) survey. This feedback should be gathered throughout the customer journey for a continuous pulse on different aspects of the user experience. For example, it’s common to send a CSAT survey after a user reaches out to a support team or makes a purchase, so companies can gauge how successful those experiences were.
If a customer gives a particularly high or a particularly low rating, or leaves an interesting piece of feedback, it may be worth scheduling a user interview with them to find out more. This helps you understand what you’re doing right and where you can improve—and enables you to fix any problematic elements before they result in churn.
User interview questions to ask for customer satisfaction:
What it is: churn analysis is the process of measuring and understanding the reasons why customers stop doing business with your company (also known as customer churn).
How user interviews help, and when to use them: consider asking customers who have churned to do a user interview so you can learn more about their reasons for canceling. However, remember that since they’re no longer customers, you may need to offer an incentive for them to give feedback.
User interview questions to ask for churn analysis:
For Hussle, an online marketplace for gyms and spas, getting feedback from users at the moment they left was crucial to understanding how they could improve their offering.
“We send out surveys to every single churned user and probably get a few insights every single day,” says Luke Calton, Product Lead at Hussle. After analyzing the results from over 1,000 users, this process revealed three key churn reasons—which ultimately led to the creation of a new Hussle product that’s more tailored to customer needs.
By sending surveys to users as they churn, Hussle captured in-the-moment feedback that led to user-centric improvements
While having specific questions in mind is a great start, how do you craft (and ask) your own user interview questions that are human, empathetic, and customer-focused? Follow these best practices.
One of our best tips for mastering user interviews? Work backward from what you’re trying to achieve.
For example, if you’re building a new feature aimed at product managers who work in startups, you’ll want to understand their typical workflow, which metrics they’re responsible for, and what sort of product design appeals to them. To gather this information, you could source interview participants from your target demographic and build a list of questions to help you uncover these insights.
“Clearly identifying the decisions that the insights from interviews will help you make is a great starting point for making the rest of the interview easy,” says Sara Hefny, a Senior Product Researcher at Hotjar. “I suggest that people work backward from the decision they have to make, then identify what they need to know in order to make that decision, and then format the questions for the interview participants based on what they’re trying to learn.”
Don’t ask this…
