Extracting the Truth

Named after the idea that even your mom shouldn't be able to lie to you about your business idea. Focus on the user's past actions, not their future intentions.

For interviews, 5-8 people is often enough to see a pattern. For surveys, you need statistical significance. Don't make big pivots based on a survey of 10 people.

In an interview, silence is a tool. If you wait after a user finishes speaking, they will often add a 'hidden gem' of information that they were initially going to skip.

Interviews and surveys are the primary tools for gathering qualitative and quantitative data. But if you ask the wrong questions, you'll get useless data.

In interviews, avoid leading questions. Don't ask 'Would you use this?'. Instead, ask 'Tell me about the last time you faced this problem.'

Surveys are for validation at scale. Use them to see if the patterns you found in interviews apply to a larger population.

Which of these is a 'Leading Question' that should be avoided in a user interview?

• →How do you currently solve this problem?
• →Don't you think our new dashboard looks much cleaner than the old one?
• →What was the most frustrating part of your last checkout experience?
• →Walk me through your daily routine.

When should you use a Survey instead of an Interview?

• →When you want to understand the emotional motivation of a single person
• →When you have identified a pattern and want to see how common it is across 500+ users
• →When you are in the very early discovery stage and don't know the problem yet
• →When you want to see a user's body language