The User Interview Exchange

Give a user interview, get a user interview. It's all free.

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User interviews are a really important part of customer discovery research, but in the past, it's been either difficult or expensive to find users in my target segment for user interviews. I needed to find a better way.

November 11, 2020 Launched V3 of The User Interview Exchange

One of the biggest pieces of feedback that I got on V2 of The User Interview Exchange (UIX) was that it was one of the ugliest websites anyone had ever seen. V3 of UIX is much prettier and is on its way to solving some of the biggest usability issues uncovered in user testing.

In addition to making it prettier, V3 helps solve one of the biggest customer questions/concerns:

Q: How do you segment users? How does it work?

A: V3 completely replaces a landing page with the experience. Users can see exactly what UIX is and how we segment (from previous learnings, we don't segment. Instead, creators post a sentence about the users they are seeking).

UIX still has a long journey ahead :)

November 3, 2020 Added a share feature

The number one issue, more than anything, for UIX is that even if UIX becomes successful it will be filled with the same types of people - UX researchers, and founders of tech companies. The biggest nut to crack here is how to encourage others to provide feedback. One of the first steps taken is to encourage sharing a post if you know someone who might be helpful. The feature makes it super simple for non-users to offer help.

Here's the thing. No one asked for this feature. Users and non-users have said they have the concern that the folks in UIX are going to be all of the same types of people. So far that is 75% true. I'm not expecting this feature to be a solution, but I think it may be a step in the right direction.

October 28, 2020 Launched V2 of The User Interview Exchange

I launched an MVP of The User Interview Exchange (UIX) a month ago. I conducted 15, 30-minute user interviews and used analytics from how users used the site to create the new and much-improved version of UIX that is now launched!

I learned a million things doing user research. For the sake of saving you the diary, here are a couple of specific learnings and how I tried to solve them:

  1. One of the (of many!) important learnings from the user interviews was that the number one reason people won't sign up is that they think that their target market won't be there. A very valid concern, that I'm still working on.

For now, I tried to solved this by changing the model to a "job board" model where you post a "user interview request" and folks explain why they might be a good user for your research. The power is in the hands of the poster to decide if the user is in their target segment or not.

  1. One important learning from the analytics was that scheduling was a pain; folks would be matched by the (simple) algorithm - which even included the time to meet that worked for both, but when they went to actually send out the invite it would fizzle out and they never end up meeting.

I tried to solve this by asking each user that signs up to have an up-to-date Calendly link. Users now skip the back and forth scheduling and scheduling is two clicks. There's still work to be done on making it easier to set up a Calendly link if you don't already have on.

All in all, it's a much-improved product. I'm looking forward to the next round of user research and analytics to drive an even better V3!

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User interviews are a really important part of customer discovery research, but in the past, it's been either difficult or expensive to find users in my target segment for user interviews. I needed to find a better way.