Remote Interviews
Remote Interviews in Detail
Scalable practical interviewing: Structured in-depth interviews to reconstruct real behaviors and mental models of users.
Focus on Past Behavior
No polite answers or vague wishes. I reconstruct concrete situations from the everyday life of the respondents to uncover real usage patterns, hurdles, and emotions.
Mental Models & Terms
Interviews reveal the linguistic and logical concepts in which users think. This provides the direct basis for an intuitive information architecture.
High Sample Size Without Travel Costs
The remote setting enables location-independent, flexible appointments. This saves the research budget and allows broader coverage of different roles.
Scope & Evaluation
From target group screener to targeted guide to transcription and thematic synthesis into compact, categorized insights.
Sample Questions from the Interview Guide
To give you a sense of what is actually asked in a remote interview, here are five question types with concrete examples. The guide is customized for every project – the structure remains the same.
1. Trigger & Motivation
The goal is to understand what set the process in motion in the first place.
- “Do you remember the last time you wanted to solve [problem/task]? What exactly triggered it?”
- “What goal did you want to achieve in that moment?”
- “How did you solve it before you used our product/service?”
2. Chronological Sequence and Actions
Here I collect the individual steps for the phases of the journey map.
- “Walk me through it step by step: What did you do first after you decided to act?”
- “Which tools, devices, or documents did you use in this step?”
- “Which other people or departments did you need to coordinate with?”
3. Emotions and Thoughts
These questions provide the data for the emotional curve of the journey.
- “What was going through your mind at that moment?”
- “How did this step feel to you? Was there uncertainty or confusion?”
- “At which point in the process were you most surprised or satisfied?”
4. Hurdles and Pain Points
Here I identify the low points of the journey from which later optimization potential arises.
- “What was the most exhausting or time-consuming part of the entire workflow?”
- “Was there a moment when you wanted to give up or did not know how to proceed? Why?”
- “What information was missing for you at that point?”
5. Conclusion and Follow-Up
The end of the journey shows whether the goal was achieved sustainably.
- “How did you know that the task was successfully completed for you?”
- “What did you do right afterwards?”
- “Is there anything you would do differently next time?”
Example Transcript
A real excerpt from a 15-minute remote interview. It shows how concrete actions, emotions, and pain points surface simultaneously in a single conversation.
Interviewer: “Tell me about the last time you submitted an expense report.”
User (Sven, Sales Manager): “That was last Tuesday after my trip to Frankfurt. I logged into the web portal to upload the receipts. But the form required the project number and meal allowance for each receipt individually. I had to check Outlook to find the project number because it wasn’t stored there. That was extremely annoying because I had ten receipts and had to re-enter everything every time. I was close to simply closing the tab and doing it later. In the end I pushed through because I wanted my money back.”
Synthesis: Affinity Map / Cluster
The statements from the transcript are directly translated into the four categories of the capture framework:
| Phase / Action | Touchpoint | Pain Point | Quote / Observation |
|---|---|---|---|
| Start reimbursement | Web portal | Login required | “That was last Tuesday after my trip to Frankfurt.” |
| Capture receipts | Web portal (form) | Project number must be entered manually and individually for each receipt | “I had to check Outlook […] because I had ten receipts and had to re-enter everything every time.” |
| Look up data | Outlook | Context switch necessary because project number is not prefilled in portal | “That was extremely annoying […]” |
| Abandon or continue process | Web portal | High frustration leads to drop-off impulse | “I was close to simply closing the tab and doing it later.” |
Insight for the User Journey
From this pattern the following can be directly derived for the journey map:
- Emotional curve: A strong decline (low point) during receipt entry due to repeated, redundant data entry.
- Opportunity (design requirement): Introduce batch processing for receipts or automatically adopt project numbers from previous entries.
Reference: From Interviews to User Journeys and User Flows
The identified phases, touchpoints, and pain points from interviews first flow into a user journey map. There, multiple touchpoints and the emotional curve across the entire process become visible. From the concrete software touchpoints of the journey, targeted user flows are subsequently modeled.
FAQ: Remote Interviews
Real facts instead of assumptions – how data-based surveys of user tasks minimize development risks.
Why a UX interview instead of normal customer conversations?
Classic customer conversations usually focus on individual wishes. UX interviews focus on real user tasks. We often discover that different job roles have to solve very similar tasks – an enormously important, often undiscovered efficiency potential.
How much time does the survey take?
A single interview takes a lean 30 minutes. The survey is conducted iteratively in blocks of 5 interviews. After each block, we jointly assess whether clear patterns are already emerging to keep the budget sharply focused on real knowledge gain.
Who takes over the recruitment of participants?
If desired, I completely take over the recruitment of interview partners. Since we have precisely mapped the affected roles in the preceding strategy workshop, the target group can be addressed very precisely and without scatter loss.
How do you avoid polite answers?
I never ask about wishes, opinions, or hypothetical scenarios (“Would you…”). The focus is exclusively on current workflows and concrete actions. Describing real activities provides neutral, objectively evaluable facts.
What about data protection (GDPR)?
All interview data and recordings are processed and stored in a GDPR-compliant manner on my own Nextcloud instance. The infrastructure is hosted in German data centers (Hetzner).
What concrete artifacts does our dev team receive?
You receive updated and sharpened user stories as well as visual user flows in the form of sequence diagrams as PDF. The dev team thus gets a clean, unambiguous basis for implementation.
Used In
This tool is part of the following consulting offer.