112 Good User/Customer Interview Questions to Uncover Insights
Interviewing users and customers is a crucial part of developing products and services that truly resonate. But coming up with the right questions to ask can be challenging.
That’s why I’ve put together this list of 112 good user/customer interview questions to uncover key insights, split into different categories:
Background Questions
Before diving into questions about your product or service, it’s important to learn more about the interviewee’s background. This context will help you better understand their perspective.
- What’s your name, and what company or organization are you with?
- What is your role there?
- How long have you been in that role?
- What are some of your main responsibilities?
- How do you interact with our product/service in your role?
- Walk me through a typical day for you. What are some of the main things you focus on?
- Outside of work, what are some of your interests or hobbies?
These introductory questions help break the ice and get a solid understanding of who the person is and what they do.
General Product/Service Questions
Next, it’s time to transition to asking about their experience and perspectives related to your product or service.
- How long have you been using our product/service?
- How did you first hear about it or start using it?
- What were your very first impressions of our product/service?
- What parts of our product/service do you use the most often? The least?
- How does our product/service fit into your overall workflow? What other tools or services do you use?
- If you had to describe our product/service to a friend or colleague, how would you describe it?
- What do you like most about our product/service?
- What do you like least, or what frustrations have you experienced?
- How does our product/service compare to others you’ve used?
- If you could change one thing about our product/service, what would it be?
- What functionality or features are missing that you’d like to see?
- How likely are you to recommend our product/service to a friend or colleague?
- What’s one word you’d use to describe your experience with our product/service?
These types of open-ended questions will reveal overall perceptions, pain points, competitor comparisons, and areas for improvement.
Specific Feature/Function Questions
Now go deeper by asking about specific parts of your product or service.
- Walk me through how you typically use [feature X].
- What do you like about [feature X]? Dislike?
- How could [feature X] be improved?
- How often do you use [feature Y]?
- What problems does [feature Y] solve for you?
- Are there any ways we could enhance [feature Y] to make it more useful?
- Do you use [feature Z]? Why or why not?
- What’s missing from [feature Z] that would make you use it more?
- If you could change one thing about [feature Z], what would it be?
- How does [feature Z] compare to similar features in other products you’ve used?
Drilling down into key features and functionality will uncover which are resonating, which need work, and which are going unused.
Usage Questions
Understanding how often and why your product or service is used is crucial.
- How often do you use our product/service per day/week/month?
- For what main reasons or tasks do you use our product/service?
- What types of decisions are you making based on the data or insights from our product/service?
- When do you typically use our product/service – certain times of day, days of the week, or is it more ad hoc?
- Where do you primarily use our product/service – at your desk, on the go on mobile, etc?
- Who on your team uses our product/service, and how do they interact with it?
- Do you use our product/service by yourself or collaborate with others? How does that collaboration work?
- What devices do you use our product/service on – desktop, laptop, tablet, phone?
- How does your usage differ across those devices?
- Are there parts of our product/service you don’t use at all? Why?
Digging into usage cadence, contexts, devices, and collaboration paints a complete picture.
Pain Points & Challenges
A key objective is surfacing major pain points and challenges.
- What are the top 3 frustrations or challenges you experience with our product/service?
- Can you walk me through a time when our product/service was difficult to use or didn’t meet your needs?
- Are there key tasks you need to accomplish that you struggle with in our product/service?
- Where in your workflow or process do you experience the most friction related to our product/service?
- What hurdles prevent you from getting more value from our product/service?
- Has our product/service ever caused delays or other bottlenecks in your work?
- Have you encountered any bugs or errors while using our product/service?
- Are there aspects of our product/service you simply avoid because they’re too complicated?
- If our product/service disappeared tomorrow, what would you miss most? Least?
- How could our product/service be most improved to help you overcome those challenges?
Targeted questions about pain points will uncover opportunities.
Integrations & APIs
If your product or service offers integrations or an API, it’s important to understand usage and needs.
- Are you using any of our integrations or API capabilities currently? Which ones?
- What value do those integrations or APIs provide?
- What integrations or APIs would add the most value if they existed?
- What challenges have you experienced with existing integrations or APIs?
- How complex was it to implement our integrations or APIs? What could be simplified?
- How has using our integrations or API impacted your overall usage of our product/service?
- Has our documentation for integrations or APIs been helpful? What could be improved?
Asking about this developer/technical perspective is invaluable if it’s applicable.
Onboarding Experience
The initial onboarding experience makes a critical first impression.
- Walk me through your first few weeks after signing up for our product/service.
- What parts of the onboarding process worked well?
- Where did you struggle or have questions?
- Was there any key info or functionality missing from the onboarding process?
- If you could change one thing to improve the onboarding experience, what would it be?
- What resources like documentation or tutorials were most helpful? Which were missing?
- How long did it take until you felt fully productive using our product/service?
- Did you receive formal training? Was it sufficient?
Onboarding issues are easily overlooked without direct questions.
Education Resources & Support
Ongoing education resources and support influence the customer experience.
- What resources like documentation, tutorials, or webinars have you utilized? How helpful were they?
- Are there gaps in educational resources that make it difficult to accomplish key tasks?
- Have you needed technical support at any point? How was that experience?
- Were you able to solve issues and get answers to questions quickly enough?
- How knowledgeable and friendly was our support team?
- What could we do to improve the educational resources and support we provide?
- Do you check our help center, knowledge base, or forums for answers? How helpful is our self-service support?
- Have you attended any live or recorded webinars we offer? How valuable were those?
Helpfulness of resources and support plays a major role in retention and growth.
Customer Service & Billing
Don’t overlook the billing and customer service relationship.
- How would you describe your interactions with our sales and customer service teams?
- During the sales process, did we listen to your needs and answer all questions sufficiently?
- How was the pricing and billing process explained? Were there any surprises later?
- Do you feel our customer service team cares about getting you results and having you succeed? Why or why not?
- If you’ve had billing questions or issues, how were those handled?
- What could we do to improve your experience interacting with our sales and customer service teams?
Billing and support experiences build loyalty and satisfaction.
Product Vision & Roadmap
Understanding the long-term vision for your product/service is informative.
- How well do you feel we communicate our overall vision and roadmap for our product/service?
- Where would you like to see our product/service go in the next 1-3 years?
- What new features or capabilities would help you accomplish your goals?
- How could we better inform you of upcoming releases, roadmap, and strategy?
- Do you have any concerns about the direction our product/service is heading?
Getting the big-picture perspective provides useful strategic input.
Competitor Products/Services
Competitor comparison questions can uncover useful differentiation opportunities.
- What other products or services have you used to accomplish similar goals?
- How does our product compare to those alternatives? Pros and cons?
- Why did you choose to use our product/service over competitors?
- Are there key features competitors offer that we are missing?
- If you switched from a competitor to our product, what prompted the change?
- Are there areas where competitors are out-innovating us rapidly?
Understanding competitive strengths and weaknesses is invaluable.
Marketing/Sales Approach
How your customers find out about and purchase your offering provides insights into marketing and sales tactics.
- How does our marketing and sales messaging compare to competitors?
- Are our website, content, ads, etc. effective at communicating our value?
- What most convinced you to sign up for our product/service?
- Did you sign up for a free trial? How could we improve the free trial?
- How did you make the case for purchasing internally? Who needed to approve the purchase?
- Did you ask for a discount or a special deal? How can we make pricing more attractive?
- How simple and seamless was the purchase/signup process?
Marketing and sales flow impact conversion and retainment.
Overall Satisfaction
Gauge overall sentiment with some final broad questions.
- How satisfied are you on a scale of 1-10? What could we do to be a 10?
- How likely are you to continue using our product/service in the next year?
- What is the key value you receive from our product/service?
The Mom Test
Here are some additional good interview questions based on “The Mom Test” principles and focusing on problem-solution fit:
- What’s the hardest part about [task X]?
- Walk me through the last time you had to [accomplish goal Y].
- What obstacles or challenges popped up as you were trying to [do task Z]?
- What solutions have you tried to [address problem A]? What worked and what didn’t?
- Imagine a magic wand could solve one problem you face with [current situation]. What problem would you want the wand to solve?
- If you had unlimited resources, what’s one thing you’d change about [process B]?
- How are you currently addressing [need C]?
- What’s the most frustrating part of your workflow when it comes to [task D]?
- What takes up the majority of your time when it comes to [activity E]?
- What would your ideal [solution F] allow you to do that you can’t do today?
- What excites you most about [new technology G]?
- If we could build any solution for you from scratch, what would you want it to do?
These types of open-ended questions focused on pains and needs will reveal insights without asking directly about potential solutions. They help uncover what job the customer is trying to get done. That’s foundational for developing product/market fit.
