Understanding your customers' needs, behaviours, and preferences is paramount when designing products and services that resonate with your target audience. One effective method for gaining these insights is through structured customer interviews. The Customer Interview Canvas is a powerful tool that can help you plan and conduct meaningful interviews.
Imagine you've developed a ride-sharing app, which allows users to share car rides. Users can register on the platform, let other users know that they have free space in their cars, book rides, check the number of available spaces in a car, track the GPS locations of drivers, pay for their bookings, and rate drivers. Additionally, you're considering integrating some innovative features like surprise discounts, in-app chat with drivers, unique in-app games, or personalised music playlists for the car ride.
But before diving into the development of these new features, it's essential to gather feedback on the current version of the app and understand what your users are missing or where improvements can be made.
Customer interviews are a goldmine of information, providing a deep understanding of the challenges and preferences of your target audience. Using a customer interview canvas can give you the following benefits:
- Structured Insights: The canvas provides a framework for gathering structured insights about your design challenge or solution. It ensures that you cover all essential aspects during the interview.
- Structured Insights: The canvas provides a framework for gathering structured insights about your design challenge or solution. It ensures that you cover all essential aspects during the interview.
- Efficiency: By organising your interview questions within the canvas, you can streamline the interview process and make the most of your time with the participant.
- In-Depth Understanding: The canvas encourages you to delve deeper into user needs, motivations, and perceptions. This depth of understanding is critical for creating products or solutions that truly resonate with your audience.
Now, let's explore how the Customer Interview Canvas can be applied to gather insights for your ride-sharing app, using five key elements: Setting the Interview Focus, Exploratory Questions, Current State, The Idea, and Feedback.
The Key Elements of the Customer Interview Canvas
- Setting the Interview Focus: In our ride-sharing app example, the interview focus is a crucial element. It ensures that your interview maintains a clear and defined objective. It guides the conversation, helping you stay on track and preventing any deviation from the core focus of the interview.
For instance, you might want to focus on understanding the user experience and needs of your current ride-sharing app users before introducing new features.
- Exploratory Questions: Instead of immediately introducing your main idea, begin with open-ended questions about the topic or context you're exploring.
For our ride-sharing app, you can ask questions like, "How do you feel about the user interface of our ridesharing app? What are the main challenges you face? What improvements would you like to see?”
- Current State: In this part, you can start to delve into more specific questions. Ask about your customers' current motivations, challenges, and behaviours related to the topic or context you're investigating.
In the case of the ride-sharing app, you might inquire about their typical usage patterns, such as how often they use the app, how their last experience was, and what features they find most valuable.
- The Idea: The "Idea" section is where you introduce the main concept or design challenge you're addressing.
In our example, this could involve presenting a prototype of a new app feature, outlining a problem definition, or discussing a specific design challenge. This part of the canvas focuses on what you'll share about your key idea, essentially creating a script for this part of the interview. For our ride-sharing app, you may present the idea of integrating unique in-app games and personalised music playlists for the car ride experience.
- Feedback: The "Feedback" section is where you seek responses from your customers regarding the idea you've just introduced. In a feedback interview, you ask for their thoughts on the output you've presented, such as what they like and what could be improved. In a discovery interview, you may ask about their previous experiences and expectations in the space you're exploring.
In our example, you might ask users how they feel about the proposed in-app games and personalised music playlists. Do they see value in these features, or do they have suggestions for improvement?
By following the Customer Interview Canvas framework with your ride-sharing app users, you can gather valuable insights and make informed decisions about which new features to prioritise. This structured approach ensures that you capture user needs, motivations, and preferences, setting the stage for a more user-centric and successful app development process.
