Why the warm-up questions in a user interview are so important

A few years ago I was walking down Glebe Point Road after a pleasant morning at the markets. Suddenly, a guy with a big microphone came up to me and asked if he could record a vox pop for his podcast. I said sure. He pointed the mic at me and asked me, right off the bat,

“So. How has social media changed your life?”

No warmup, no intro. I went from walking along thinking about what I was going to make for lunch to being asked about the impact of a very large abstract concept on my life over the last decade or so.

Very hard to answer.

I was like, “ah… ummm… well, I was just using Instagram to stalk my ex from high school??”

I walked off feeling horrified at myself, like, I just gave the most vapid-sounding answer ever. Needless to say, I don’t think he used that soundbite in his podcast.

I always tell this story as an example of the purpose of warm up questions when you’re running a user interview. I definitely have things to say about how social media has changed my life. But that interviewer didn’t get to hear them! Knowing what I know now, I think how things might have been different.

He should have warmed me up.

If he’d asked a few easy questions first, easing in to the topic of social media and building up to the big question, I would have been so much better set up for success, and he would have got such better answers.

He could have asked first, “So tell me, what social media platforms do you use?” That’s easy to answer. Facebook, Twitter, Medium, Instagram, Reddit, Designer News, Quora…

Then he could have directed the conversation towards thinking about social media over time. “What was the first social media you used?” That would be MySpace for sure. Now I’m in the frame of mind of thinking about way back in 2006 when social media felt brand new.

“What did you do before you first used MySpace?” Actually. I remember, before MySpace, I used MSN Messenger in 2004–2005. Is that social media? I used to be obsessed with MSN Messenger as a teenager. I remember having conversations with friends every night and feeling like we could talk about stuff online that we would never talk about face to face.

Do you still feel like that?

Where do you have conversations online now?

Do you ever talk to people you don’t know IRL online?

How do you think social media is changing your life in that regard?

Has it changed anything else in your life?

…And so on. Rather than blindsiding someone with a slammer of a hard question — gently directing them into the frame of mind through the topic, until you naturally get to the thing you want to talk about. It might take longer, but I think it’s non-negotiable. Not just for the comfort of the interviewee, but for your sake, in actually getting the useful information out of their brain.

I wonder how many useable quotes that interviewer got that day, putting people on the spot like that.

He didn’t set his interviewee up for success, so he didn’t get good results.

That’s the worst thing you can do in a user interview — set your interviewee up for failure.

Here’s how not to make the same mistake.

Never skip warmup questions.

This story right here is the purpose of warm up questions — so you don’t do the equivalent of blindsiding someone on the street and getting in return a blurted out vacuity about Instastalking. Be kind to your interviewees and set them (and you) up for success, by taking your interviewee on a journey and building up to the hard questions.

Create a storyline.

Think about how you can create a storyline in a user interview. That might look like a set of questions you pre-wrote beforehand, or it might just be some scribbles on a piece of paper — the important thing is that you thought about how you could naturally get a person from zero to sharing good insights.