Guides / User interviews

User interview discovery questions

What to ask when you don't know what you don't know

What you can take away from this guide

Who is this guide for

Professionals and organizations are always growing. They are growing because of the demands of their businesses. Many times expansion nessesitates doing things the professional or the business does not have a core competancy in.

To gain competency in a quick and efficent manner research is done, many times that research includes conducting user interviews.

Some roles and professions that require learning about areas without too much prior knowledge include:

User Experience (UX) Researchers and Designers

UX Researchers and Designers are responsible for doing the leg work on learning about how to best create or improve a product or service. These individuals must gain a deep understanding of the target user in order to provide the best designs and experiences. Since they do not have all the information they need at the onset of a research project they will use discovery questions to gain a high level understand and then subsequently decide on how to drill down from there.

Market researchers

Market researchers are responsible for assessing a specific market or ecosystem and then provider recommendations on patterns or trends, or just share their learnings with their clientele. The data they collect is used to guide organization as they try to determine an appropriate next course of action. These market research firms may not have a deep knowledge of a specific market and so can use discovery questions when composing their surveys, questionnaires, and opinion polls. Conducting user interviews is also a task they can perform.

Product managers

Product managers spend their time driving a specific product or service along to provide value to the organization. Their work involves many tasks and can also include conducting customer and stakeholder interviews. Often times the business will require a new product to be created, a new feature to be built, or various tasks to be prioritized. If important information is not available to make a decision a product manager can conduct interviews if it will help move the work forward. Discovery questions can help a product manager gain knowledge in a particular field they or their organization do not have the answer for. New product development is an especially fitting senario which could require developing discovery questions and conducting user interviews.

Entrepreneurs and Startups

Entrepreneurs and Startups have to bring an idea to market that they may not entirely understand. Conducting user interviews helps them get closer to their target users and helps them gain deeper understandings. Discovery questions are a logical tool to use during their research and customer development interviews.

Marketers and growth professionals

Marketers and growth professionals have to drive awareness and usage for a particular product or service. These individuals operate as part of a product/service company or on a consulting firm. Their actions will help improve brand image and awareness, increase activity through the product's funnels, or improve various product or service KPIs. As they experiment with new channels to target or assist the organization in bringing a new product/service/feature to market they may need to gain knowledge about new areas. Using discovery questions in their user interviews will help shed light about such things has user behavior, communities, expectations, and results. This information is valuable in determining how to market to those users and how to help them get more value from a particular product or service.

Sales professionals

A sales professional has to balance their primary objectives (sales) while reflecting positively of the organization as many people don't like being "sold to". Sales professionals use many types of tactics to understand their prospects in order to determine the best way to help these prospects understand the value of what they are selling. Discovery questions, carefully selected and genuinely stated, can help build trust with the prospects as well as help the sales professional know if their offering is a good fit.

Assumptions

What follows is a breakdown of various types of discovery questions along with examples of how to use them. We're going to make a few assumptions about the reader of this guide. Although asking these questions is useful, the correct questions to ask, and angles to approach the interview from would be better realized if some of these assumptions were met.

On leading questions

Leading questions, either for discovery or validation, are structured in such a way that they tend to influence their outcome. They expose the interviewer's assumptions and can cast a shadow of doubt on the results of your research. Some questions are blatantly leading while others are almost unnoticeably so. It is my own opinion that any question is a leading question, even if it’s to the most miniscule degree. It is important to understand this so that the degree an interviewer leads their interviewee is clear and that those assumptions can be taken into account when analyzing the results.

Extreme examples (to highlight the point)

A glaringly leading question: How happy would you be if you won a billion dollar lottery?

What’s wrong with this? (so much). To keep is simple let’s just focus on the “happy” part. By asking someone how happy they would be is guiding them to focus on happiness of some hypothetical event. What if their instinct is indifference, or sadness? You’ve forced them to answer from the perspective of happiness.

A not so obviously leading question: What is your biggest challenge at work?

Assuming this question is being asked of someone who is employed, the leading part is forcing them to discuss “challenge” at work. If your pre-work/recruiting/earlier question of this respondent did not identify a problem or a challenge at work that this interviewee voluntarily provided, this question is a leading one.

This interviewee could be perfectly happy at work, perhaps never contemplating the idea there there are "challanges at work". With this question they are now answering a question that had never really occured to them.

Leading questions aren’t bad as long as the interviewer understands the degree to which they can influence a response and the context through which the interviewee is giving feedback. Ideally the magnitude of the leading question should be reduced in areas of the interview that are most critical, but leading questions can serve other purposes that can help a study along, such as rapport building or as breadcrumbs leading to discovery.

Discovery questions in general

Discovery questions as a group are a series of questions and statements directed at an interviewee in order to gain an understanding of the interviewees specific circumstance and viewpoints on a general topic. The exploratory nature of discovery questions encourages the interviewer to explore the bounds of their research through these unbound open ended questions. Although the interviewer may have a motive or hypothesis in asking these questions, since they should be asked without too much guidance, they allow the interviewee space to respond and so will give the interviewer data that addresses their question, as well as data that leads into other subjects that the interviewee finds the need to mention.

Discovery Question categories

Throw a dart at a map

These discovery questions are great for starting an interviewing sessions. They help the interviewee ease into the conversation by answering questions that are unbounded and not taxing on their train of thought. These interview questions help build rapport. The responses to these questions can be used as a gateway to follow on questions either continuing with discovery questions, or perhaps are a lead-in into validation questions. Depending on the specificity of the questions, some of these questions can either be used in a research screener to see if the potential interviewee is of the correct profile/persona being searched for, or they can be used in surveys. At a one on one interview, the value to these questions is in the follow up. (Ask “why” or “can you elaborate?”)

These questions can look like:

Tell me a story

These can be more requests and statements than questions. Their intended purpose is to dig deeper into a specific topic or area. By being more specific they begin to expose the underlying goal of this interview (not that it needs to be a secret, but ideally the conversation would flow rather than be guided). These questions can overlap with the “Throw a dart at a map” type questions but when comparing the two, we can see these are more task based and more focused. These questions look like:

Zeroing in

These discovery questions are ideally used after something has been said that will allow the interviewer to gracefully flow into them and can come off as follow up questions. These interview questions are very specific. They clearly tell the interviewee what the interviewer wishes to discuss and so may influence the responses a bit. Since these questions are more specific they tend to yield very specific answers and so can give the interviewer more data points with which to follow up on with more specific questions. Zeroing-in type discovery questions look like:

In a perfect world, and other hypotheticals

These discovery questions give the interviewee an opportunity to release the shackles (assuming they’re shackled by something). They are intended to expose the internal workings of the interviewee to get a better understanding of how they see themselves and how they would prefer things to be. These questions should be asked at the end of the interview to help the interviewer frame the conversation with the interviewee. They are not an open permission to chase after the whims of the responses, since the questions themselves are rooted in a fictional context. These questions can look like:

Now that we’ve seen a few discovery questions let’s go over a few scenarios of how to use them in tandem in an interview script.

Scenario: Building a new software feature

A Customer Relationship Management platform is thinking of adding a social media tracking feature.

What do we know?
  • Our CRM provider has many customers (small businesses) but is not a leader in its industry
  • Our CRM provider thinks adding this feature will reduce churn and open up additional prospecting channels
  • A few customers have asked for this feature
  • Shipping this feature will take 3 months for a small development team of 6 (developers, PM, design)

Since the challenge is to determine if the new feature should be built, as opposed to making another investment, a UX Research Designer or Product Manager within the CRM provider needs to determine if building out this feature is worth the cost of a small team’s time.

Since this new feature is intended to reduce churn and open additional prospecting channels we should create a different interview script for each persona.

Interview script for existing CRM customers:
  • Can you tell me about your business's most pressing challenges?
  • Can you describe your marketing process?
  • Can you describe how you acquire new customers?
  • (If social was not mentioned in the previous questions) Do you use social media as a marketing or sales channel and if so, how?
Interview script for desired prospects:
  • Have you ever used any CRM tools? If so which?
  • Which CRM tool(s) are you using now? How did you come to using this tool?
  • Can you tell me about the types of customers you serve?
  • Can you tell me about your business's most pressing challenges?
  • Can you describe your marketing process?
  • Can you describe how you acquire new customers?
  • Do you use social media as a marketing or sales channel and if so, how?

These two interview scripts are very similar because they intend to shed light on existing pain points and behavior. The guide for new prospects includes questions that could be used in a screener, a questionnaire, or discovered through various marketing tactics (through self selection). Depending on the hypothesis or vision of the product team, more specific validation questions could be included with these scripts.

Scenario: Starting a physical goods startup

An Entrepreneur with manufacturing experience in travel bags has an idea for a stylish leather travel bag for business travelers that is different from everything else in the market.

What do we know?
  • The product is still an idea.
  • The Entrepreneur is obsessed with the idea.
  • The Entrepreneur has a lot of experience with both travel and travel goods manufacturing.
  • Launching on Kickstarter will take 3 months to organize campaigns and build buzz and around $50k for initial marketing and prototypes.

The goal here is for the Entrepreneur to determine if spending 3 months and $50k is the right course of action in order to start the travel bag company via a Kickstarter launch.

In order to learn if he/she is on the right track this Entrepreneur may want to interview frequent business travelers. The interview script could include these questions:

  • How often do you travel for work?
  • What modes of travel do you do most often?
  • Can you describe your business trip packing/preparation process?
  • What sorts of travel bags do you use and why?
  • What do you like about your current bag?
  • What do you dislike about your current bag?
  • What other bags have you owned why do you no longer use those bags?
  • Have you ever heard of <competing brand's bag>? If so, what are your thoughts about it (or a feature of it)?

Although our Entrepreneur is experienced in the travel bag industry, he/she intends to create something “new” and that my require additional risk mitigation since there is no precedent in the market. This interview guide is intended to expand the entrepreneur's current knowledge of the market as well as shed light on the positioning and features this new bag should address.

Scenario: Internationally expanding the marketing effort of a software service business

A leading US based online real estate platform company wishes to drive continued growth by expanding into international markets. The UK, Canada, and Australia are deemed as possible targets for expansion.

What do we know?
  • This organization has a profitable and admired product
  • It has the workforce (marketing/product) to sustain expansion into one new market
  • This organization knows its customer persona very well
  • The effort to gain market share from incumbents and expand is a multi-year endeavor which will cost millions of dollars in both marketing and product development

The goal here is to determine which of the countries is the best one to enter at this point in time.

A strategy for interviewing potential users could include the following discovery questions.

  • What are the most important challenges your real estate development company is facing?
  • How do you set your developments apart from you competitors?
  • On which platforms do you currently list your developments?
  • What do you like about these platforms?
  • What do you dislike about these platforms?
  • Have you ever heard of <expanding US company>? If so, what have you heard about them?

These questions focus on the particular business’ challenges as well as on the existing ecosystem. The expanding company should learn if their current personas match up with those of their potential customers in the new markets. They should also begin to build a picture of how their prospects use their competitors as well as how their prospects view their brand.

Discovery questions for stakeholder interviews

Conducting user research isn’t limited to a target user or customer persona. For a project to succeed all participants should be taken into account. If it makes sense, other stakeholders should be a part of the research. Discovery questions are great to ask stakeholders because they can help clarify the goals of the project and the metrics for success. The stakeholders can often include the entire organization as they may be upstream or downstream from the deliverable for a project. These stakeholders may be C-level, Product Management, Project Management, Business Development, Sales, Software Development, Support and even Operations or Accounting. A few discovery questions for stakeholder interviews can include:

When directed at the various stakeholders these questions, and other like them, can allow the researcher to add additional questions in their interviewing guide or to help shape recommendations and findings from the research.

Putting it all together

Discovery questions are a great way to learn about your interviewee and the way they see themselves in the world. These questions can reveal all sorts of interesting information and it is on the interviewer to decide which responses need a follow up “why” and which responses are not of interest to the research. When choosing which discovery question will be included in your research keep in mind the person you will be speaking with and what you hope to learn from them. If you find that you’re not learning from your discovery questions perhaps ask yourself if the issue is with the interviewee, if it is with the questions, or if it is with you. It is okay to change questions, interviewee personas, and even researchers if you don’t think the feedback is useful. Nothing is set in stone, and just as the questions are made to be flexible, your research can be as well.

Feedback & Questions

Is there a particular subject or item you feel should be added to this guide? Let us know by emailing us at hello@confirmkit.com.

If you've found this guide useful please share. 🙏

Want to know when the next guide is published?

Add your Email and we'll keep you in the loop of future interviewing-related publications and ConfirmKit news. Big things are in the works!