How to interview Customers

Knowledge Sharing:
1.  Focus groups are a group-think, distraction-filled mess. Avoid them and only talk to one person at a time. If desired, you can bring someone with you to take notes — some UX designers like this approach.
2.  Personally, I tend to do one-on-one interviews because I think people loosen up and thus open up a bit more, but it can be nice to have a note-taker, which allows you to focus entirely on the conversation and body language.
3.  Have your assumptions and thus learning goals prioritized ahead of time. Decide who you want to talk to (age, gender, location, profession/industry, affluence, etc), and target interviewees accordingly. Prep your basic flow and list of questions. You might veer off the plan to follow your nose, which is great, but go in prepared.
4.  Decide up front if your focus is going to be on learning a user’s behavior and mindset, and/or getting direct feedback or usability insights on a product or mockup. Do not mix the two in the discussion flow or things will get distorted.
5.  Put “behavior and mindset” first in your discussion flow. During this part, don’t let the interviewee go too deep in terms of suggesting features, but keep them focused on if they have a problem, how they think about the problem space, and if and how they have tried to solve it in past.
6.  If you want to get feedback on a product, whether on paper or digital, do this after digging into behavior and mindset.
7.  If you don’t do this, you might find yourself selling or convincing, or even hearing what you want to hear. This is called “confirmation bias” and we are all very susceptible to it.  Your initial goal should be learning.
8.  People are trained not to call your baby ugly. You need to make them feel safe to do this. Ask them up-front to be brutally honest, and that this is the very best way they can help you. If they seem confused, explain that the worst thing that could happen is to build something people didn’t care about.
9.  Sometimes it is hard not to ask a yes/no question, but always follow up with an open-ended question like “why?” or “tell me more about that experience.”
10.  people are not very good at predicting their actions, knowing what they want, or knowing their true goals. Your job is not to ask the person for the solution. It is *your* job to figure out the best solution, and then validate that your solution is actually right.
11.  People *love* to talk about features and solutions. When you are in learning mode, don’t let that dominate the conversation.  Try to keep things factual. Get them to tell you stories about how they previously experienced a problem, if they tried to solve it (or why not), and what happened.  Get them to tell you stories about using other products that are in the same domain space. You do want to dive into their emotions, but you can trust a discussion of historical emotions much more than one speculating “what ifs”.
12.  Anytime something tweaks your antenna, drill down with follow up questions. Don’t be afraid to ask for clarifications and the “why” behind the “what”. You can even try drilling into multiple layers of “why” (see “Five Whys”), as long as the interviewee doesn’t start getting annoyed.
14.  If it is not obvious to everyone by now, let me just be clear that you want to avoid doing these interviews with friends and family. There are lots of creative ways to recruit interviewees (the tactics vary depending on who you need to get to), but getting referrals will make the process a lot easier
15.  You need to use your judgement to read between the lines, to read body language, to try to understand context and agendas, and to filter out biases based on the types of people in your pool of interviewees. But it is exactly the ability to use human judgement based on human connections that make interviews so much more useful than surveys.
16.  Each has its place in the Customer Development process, but without live Customer Development Conversations, you are likely compromising your ability to learn your way to Product-Market fit or startup scaling.  What you seek to learn evolves over time, as do the tactics you employ, but every step of the way should be grounded in real time conversations.
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References:
http://giffconstable.com/2012/12/12-tips-for-early-customer-development-interviews-revision-3/
http://jasonevanish.com/2012/01/18/how-to-structure-and-get-the-most-out-of-customer-development-interviews/