What's the best way to conduct user research interviews?

Have a clear understanding of what to ask, how to ask, how to approach, and where to approach. Well-defined questions and targeting the right audience would lead to an end with a successful result. I have come across user research where I need to learn “Necessity of Caravans” in India. Questions were planned in such a way that we get a clear vision of customers' real needs.

My foremost aim in user research journey has been to bridge the gap between our product and customer aspirations. It's about deciphering their motivations, understanding their context, and anticipating their behaviors. Crafting precise questions to uncover these hidden drivers (hopes, pains, barriers, and context) enables the team to think like the users allowing them to fine-tune the approach for a more impactful user experience.

Recruit you participants by segmenting then first, based on any high level usage metric. In B2C, recruitment is hard- you can also seek 3pl for recruitment, just give them the recruitment and customer contacts to work with in b2b the recruitment is easier so email/ phone call is the way to go. In b2b If you are a new product, you can always keep a always accessible “share you feedback” button to schedule a call with development/accounts team for 1-1 feedback and feature requests

This is the most crucial step in any user survey, not deciding the right audience would lead to different results or false results. The target audience must be segregated based on different segmentations. Different target audiences may have different questions to ask. Approach strategy may vary as well. Motivate them by offering incentives would be a great approach but not always work. Incentives should be offered in such a way as to engage more and more users

Questions should be decided in such a way as to align with our goal and based on different segmentation. Users may have different segments and needs, according questions should be chosen. Draft multiple questions but not to be asked all at the time of conducting the survey. Since our target should be to get enough data to validate rather than asking multiple questions

Try not to reveal your company because it creates a bias, Ask open ended questions to decipher their problems, motivations and actions from the stories they share never ask what would want us to do in xyz situation.

This is one of the most crucial steps towards getting our desired result. Different users have different techniques to approach. Always, create an engaging and comfortable environment by asking some general questions to start with like their name, where are they from, etc. In many instances observing users and finding out how they perform a certain task would also lead to desired answers or learnings.

Quantitative and Qualitative surveys have different techniques to analyse. Data must be good enough to validate our assumptions. Different trends and patterns should be aligned with the target goal to reach a conclusion for different assumptions

Whatever the questions you design, ask the user for their story, not answers. A story can go where no data is allowed permission!

It's sometimes hard to get a dedicated interview with high value users. What you should consider is relying on important milestones in the customer journey to engage with them as part of another process. For example, as part of an upsell sales process that is taking place, or as part of the onboarding process.