User interview recruitment made easy
Not every interview has to be with real customers
Hi there,
When I first started running user interviews, I thought the only way was to speak to real customers.
I’d go half-mad trying to get enough current and previous customers to spend just half an hour speaking to me—a lot of begging was involved.
Over time, I’ve learned that mixing real, panel, and even AI personas can unlock different types of insights and balance speed and depth of insights:
Real users are best when you need emotional depth and context.
Panel users (paid/recruited users) work when speed matters, or if you’re pre-launch and don’t have customers yet.AI personas are useful for brainstorming, but they’ll never replace real conversations.
The trick is knowing which format fits the stage you’re currently in.
Practical tips
Here are some lessons I learned along the way:
Shorten interviews from 45 minutes to 20 minutes. Show-up rates almost always improve, and you can go deeper on a few questions to still get quality insights.
Use channels your audience already knows. Gen Z audiences were more likely to pick up a WhatsApp call than via Google Meet.
Make incentives relevant. A voucher in a customer’s niche often beats offering your own product.
Mixing these small changes with the right type of participant has saved me from many “empty calendar” moments. A client hadn’t done this before, and they only got two bookings. We made this and a few other switches (my foolproof email template is included in the article), and we suddenly got 20+ bookings. Score.
Recommendation
Convert, an incredible testing platform for Shopify, sponsors this week’s newsletter. If you’ve got the traffic to run A/B tests, they’re a great platform to use.
They have a detailed guide on UX research. User interviews (with its variations) are but one form of user research.
This guide covers 10 types of user research and explains when to use each. I love how Maheen Kanwal also explains how to connect it to your experimentation process.
So user interviews with real users aren’t your only option, but if they’re the right one for you, spend some extra time on improving your approach, and it’ll go a long way in getting slots booked.
Till next time,
Daphne