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The first step is to recruit some folks who fit the provisional persona that you created. Your goal is to find people who match most of the criteria in the demographic and behavior sections of the persona document. So, if you decided that the person most likely to have the problems that your product will solve is a single, left-handed dentist in Boise, Idaho, who owns her own dental practice, has a problem finding good dental equipment designed for lefties, and loves her iPhone, then you’re going to start looking for people who match that description as closely as possible.

This also applies if you’re talking to real users of your product. Depending on the persona you’ve created, you may only want to talk to administrators or people who have used your product for more than a year, or users who have accessed a specific feature in the last three weeks. You shouldn’t interview just anybody who uses your product. You need to focus on the type of person whose behavior you’re planning to change with a new feature or fix.

Whatever the screening criteria is, you want to find five of these folks who will talk to you for between 30 and 60 minutes as soon as you can get them scheduled. There are lots of techniques for making sure that you get good research participants. I’m not going to go into them in detail here.

PRO TIP

Sometimes finding people for research can be challenging, especially for new products that don’t have users yet. On the other hand, at some point you’re going to have to find hundreds, thousands, or maybe even millions of people who want to buy your product. If you can’t find five who will talk to you for 30 minutes about it, maybe it’s not a great market for you.

Once you find five people in your target persona to talk to you, you’re not going to talk about just anything, and you’re certainly not going to ask them what they’d like you to build. Instead, you’re going talk to them about their problems, behaviors, needs, and goals.

If you’ve already got a product with users, your specific questions and methodology will be a bit different than if you’re working on something entirely new, but the target is the same. You’re looking for patterns by asking about problems and how they’ve attempted to solve the problems in the past. You’re trying to find out what goals they’re trying to reach and how they’ve been prevented from reaching them in the past.

As an example, let’s look at the type of questions you might ask eBay sellers who are trying to track their sales. These are not the only possible questions, but it’s a good selection of the type you’ll want to ask.

Sample questions:

• Tell me about your business on eBay.

• How do you currently keep track of your business?

• How do you know how much money you’re making? How about how much you’re spending?

• Have you had any problems or issues with this system? If so, what?

• How did you decide to track things this way?

• Have you used any other systems to track this sort of thing in the past? If so, how did they work for you? Why did you stop using them?

• Will you show me what sorts of things you do on a typical day of your business?

If you’re talking to a current user of your product, you’d make sure to also ask whether they used anything in addition to your product, or if there were any related things that they did on a regular basis for which they couldn’t use your product.

There’s more about good interviewing techniques in the next chapter, but these are the types of open-ended, problem-finding questions that will get you a lot of useful information and help you spot patterns quickly.

The most important thing is to remember that this is your chance to listen and learn—not to sell. Selling comes later.