Thread by @jensthang

"Talk to users" is a key thing for startups (and probably applicable to other areas as well). Lots of gems from @eshear lecture on 'How to run a user interview'.

Thread:

1/ You need the answer to the question: who is my user and where am I going to find them?

2/ Think about not what you would ask or what the right features for this app is, but who would you talk to?

3/ I wish I could tell you the recipe for figuring who the target user is for your product, and who your target user should be, but there isn't a recipe. It comes down to thinking really hard and using your judgment to figure out who you are really building this for.

4/ When you are at the very beginning of a startup, when you have this idea that you think is awesome, you want to talk to the broadest group you possibly can.

5/ You don't just want to talk to one type of person. You want to get familiar with the various kind of people who could be contributing.

6/ The main thing you're trying to do when running this first set of interviews is not necessarily ask questions about optimizing user flow. Or questions about the specifics of any of that stuff. That can be distracting because users think they know what they want.

7/ So you want to stay as far away from features as possible because the things they tell you feel overwhelmingly real.

8/ When you have a real user asking you for a feature, it's very hard to say no to them because here's a real person who really has this problem.

9/ But as you start to talk to lots of people and really get a sense for what their problems are, you figure out if this is actually a promising area or not.

10/ Just because you don't get anything out of talking to the first person doesn't mean there are not going to be more people who actually have a problem.

11/ Once you've talked to about six to eight people, you are usually about done. It's unlikely you're going to discover a bunch of new information. Which is why it is important to talk to different extremes of people. Go find people who are different.

12/ Think about how to convert users to your new thing that has the features of existing solution plus this one special thing that is going to make it more useful and convince them to stop using the thing they are already using.

13/ The question is now, once you have this idea, is this enough? Is this something people would actually switch to?

14/ One, if you are quick at programming you can literally just go build it, throw it out into the world, and see what happens.

15/ Two, you might take that idea and draw diagrams of what it would look like. Draw the work flow and put that in front of people.

16/ The one thing you really don't want to do is ask them about a great idea for a feature. Because the feedback you get from users if you tell them about a feature and ask them, "Is this feature good?" is often, "Oh yeah that's great."

17/ The one question you can't ask is, "Is this feature actually good or not?"

18/ Ask them, "Are you excited about it?"

19/ What's the minimum you can actually get away with to validate your product. Find a way to cheat is what it comes down to, because if you can't actually put it in front of people it's really, really hard to find that out.

20/ Get people to give you their credit card and I guarantee you they are actually interested in the feature. It's one of the most validating things that you can do for a product.

21/ People who are using your service already are willing to put up with all these issues, which kind of means that these are probably not the biggest problems.

22/ The majority of people you are competing with are non-users.

23/ If all you do is look at your competitors and talk to people who use your competitors' products, you can never expand. You're not learning things that help you expand the size of the market. You want to talk to people who aren't even trying to use these things yet.

24/ We would invent these ideas at Justin.tv without talking to someone and then 9 times out of 10, that idea would turn out to be bad.

25/ You're going to have this great idea and you're going to talk to users and it’s going to turn out that nobody actually wants it.

26/ They are actually concerned about a completely different set of things and they don't care about what you thought was important at all.

27/ The most common mistake is showing people your product. Don't show them your product. It’s like telling them about a feature. You want to learn what's already in their heads. You want avoid putting things there.

28/ Another big mistake people make is talking to who is available rather than talking to who they need to talk to.

29/ Because if you just talk to who's easy to talk to, you're not getting the best data.

30/ The fortunate side there is almost everyone is flattered to be asked what they think, so they will actually talk to you and tell you things.

31/ You definitely want to Skype. You don't want to do interviews over email if you can avoid it, because interviews over email are non-interactive. Email interviews are basically useless.

32/ Given that we had very limited resources, we focused on the people using competing products. We knew that they were already interested in the behavior that we needed and they were willing to do it at all.

33/ Therefore all we had to do was convince them to switch, which is much easier to do than to create a new behavior.

34/ I want a user to tell me what they are really thinking. What their problems really are.

35/ To just sort of ramble. I want someone to just tell me about stuff in their life. The more you learn about them as a person and the context of what they are doing, the easier it is to understand why they want the things they want. That's really the critical question.

36/ What I am looking for in someone when I am doing a user interview is someone who is going to be willing to talk a lot and be willing to give me a full picture.

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