So I am trying to understand do people actually bother interviewing their users to see how their product is really being used? I thought this was the default approach, but I feel like a lot of people and SaaS businesses just use feedback boards, which is so different. User interviews definitely have some disadvantages as well, but curious to see what other people think?
Not enough people do this. I think there’s a few reasons - it’s hard to do if you’re not used to it. Embedding yourself gets you a new point of view, but there’s a real skill to designing interviews and UX research (that can be taught).
Users a great, but an outside expert perspective really helps to accelerate things too.
I started a service a few weeks ago which seems to really help alongside user feedback. I offer deep-dive product feedback on UX, behavioural design, onboarding, IA, landing page.. product positioning and more. All the advice relates to metrics people want to improve and they also provide competitors to compare against (http://the-Poe-things.com).
I advocate on every video that people should go and talk to more users! It’s never enough.
My feeling is people need to see it done - not a course, but actually watch an interview being done. That really helps to demystify doing it well.
Interviewing is underrated, don't let yourself get detached from getting first-hand data.
Suhail's advice quoted in other responses is great. Don't JUST conduct interviews, but become part of the community, eat your own dog food, and truly go through their pain.
Nothing beats face to face interviews, but you could do some Async of time is scarce.
At the end on the day, data is great, but it creates several blind spots. You gotta be very clear of what data you have, and which data you DON'T. The later is the most important one ;)
I would never "interview" a user if I could do the following instead:
observe my users, because actions speak louder than words. Also, sometimes users can't articulate something that they're not even aware of
be the end user and immerse myself in the same world as my users. Then you know longer need to ask questions to verify. You just have a normal conversation with users about what you're thinking
If I do talk to users, I would focus the conversation entirely on what they've done in the past, not what they say they will do.
Talking to users is important but I feel it's very easy to find false positives
Inspired by this tweet:
I can relate to this,at first you think you are getting alot of information but in reality most of it is just false positives...
Both are very important. But if I was only allowed to choose one, I'd talk to users every day. If telemetry and metrics didn't exist at all I could still do my job.
In my experience talking to other startup founders, people say they do, or they aspire to, but oftentimes they don't, for whatever reason like time, incentive, etc.
You most often see this with technical founders rather than business ones.
It depends. On my end, we're doing both.
Feedback boards are great to support the roadmap and business decisions. I find that it's also helping reinforce the positioning of your brand (e.g. someone telling you that you should have a lower pricing point but you're adding more features that can be considered "high-end".)
But customer interviews are much more valuable IMO. You can confirm so many things, understand the onboarding friction points, ask about new features, understand where these customers are for your marketing, etc. I feel like both of these are complimentary but I could only do one of those, I would go all-in with customer interviews and create multiple categories of interviews instead.
Both of those methods are important, and they serve totally different purposes. A feedback board is a good way to get "hot takes" from users, or quick suggestions on stuff that's been bugging them. Those always have to be put through the lens of the total roadmap, your resources, and your ultimate vision for the product (caution on just taking all feedback as gospel, you could end up with too many features if you just say "yeah, that's cool, we'll do that").
Customer interviews are more important for establishing relationships and getting deeper long-term insight into how that person works, and how your product fits into their daily life. You have the chance to really see them and listen more actively than you can sometimes within a forum topic or chat stream.