What I learned from continuously interviewing users

During the many years in product management, I did hundreds of user lab sessions. The most important thing I learned:

You want the user to be excited about your prototype.

Sounds obvious, right? It has two major implications:

You don’t guide the user by asking her about specific details about the prototype.

If she doesn’t recognise your new beloved feature / design / flow by herself, it’s either irrelevant to her or the lab setup is not the right way to test it. Asking her to find it / use it / rate it does not give you any insight. Of course she will do so and answer your questions (“That’s what I am paid for, right?”), but these answers are not giving you the insights you are looking for. In a way, they are not honest, because the user does only tell you something random because you forced her to do so.

You don’t give the user tasks to solve.

You created a new feature and now you want it to be tested. Sure. So you tell her to put two books into the shopping basket and pay via PayPal. Right? Wrong! Giving the user a task to solve, is totally against what she will do with your product at home. If the interaction with the prototype is not coming from within the user herself, it is so unnatural like forcing a paperback lover to use the newest Kindle. They will do if you pay them, but once they are out of the lab, they will go back to their shelf and pick a book. Giving them tasks is just the same, less brutal though.

What you really want is to get the users excited about the new feature or whatever you are testing. They need to want to use it by themselves, when they discover it. You want to collect spontaneous feedback, because that is honest. And this will only happen without guiding questions.