User interview
Definition
A user interview is a structured or semi-structured conversation between a researcher or product team member and a current or potential user, aimed at understanding that user's context, problems, behaviors, and motivations.
User interviews are the most direct tool for product discovery. Done well, they replace assumptions with evidence. Done poorly, they confirm whatever the interviewer already believed.
The single most important rule: ask about the past, not the hypothetical future. "Tell me about the last time you had to summarize a meeting" generates far more reliable signal than "Would you use a feature that summarized meetings automatically?" People are bad at predicting their own future behavior. They're much better at describing what they actually did.
A good user interview structure:
- Warm-up — role, context, how they currently do the thing you're studying.
- Specific story elicitation — "Tell me about the last time..." questions that walk through a concrete episode.
- Probe for causes — "Why did you do it that way?" "What were you trying to accomplish?" "What happened next?"
- Wrap-up — anything they want to add, any questions for you.
Avoiding leading questions is harder than it sounds. "Don't you find it frustrating when..." tells the user what answer you want. "How did that feel?" lets them tell you.
User interview synthesis is traditionally a whiteboard exercise: affinity mapping quotes and observations, clustering them into themes, identifying the highest-frequency pain points. BoardSnap captures those synthesis boards as structured summaries, making it easy to trace which insights drove which product decisions.
Examples
- A 45-minute Zoom call with a current user asking about their whiteboard-to-notes workflow
- A synthesis session where the team affinity-maps quotes from twelve user interviews on a whiteboard
- A recruit-and-interview cycle where the PM speaks to five users before each sprint planning
- A hallway test turned into a brief interview after watching a user navigate an onboarding flow
Snap a user interview. Ship its actions.
BoardSnap turns any whiteboard — including this one — into a summary and action plan.