User Interviews Without Leading Questions: How to Get Honest Answers

A small team is building software that helps trade businesses (plumbers, electricians, carpenters) write quotes for their customers. The next big idea is already decided: let people create quotes right on the job site, on their phone. Before development starts, the team wants to “talk to some customers.” So someone from product management calls five businesses and asks: “Wouldn’t it be handy if you could write quotes on your phone right there on site?”

All five say yes. The team is happy, builds the feature, and three months later the numbers show that hardly anyone uses it. Eventually it turns out that most businesses write their quotes in the evening at the office, because they need to look up wholesale prices and check their calendar first. On the job site, there simply isn’t the time or quiet for that.

So the conversations did happen. They just confirmed what the team already believed. The problem wasn’t the people being interviewed, it was the question. It came with the answer built in. This article shows you how to prepare, run and analyze user interviews so they actually teach you something new. It’s written explicitly for teams without a dedicated research role too, where design, product or engineering run the interviews alongside everything else.

Why leading questions do so much damage

A leading question is a question that suggests a particular answer. Sometimes that’s obvious (“That’s much easier, isn’t it?”), but often it’s subtle. A single word can be enough to shift the answer.

A classic memory study shows how strong this effect is. In 1974, Elizabeth Loftus and John Palmer showed students films of car accidents and then asked how fast the cars were going when they “smashed,” “collided,” “bumped,” “hit” or “contacted” each other. Only that one verb changed. With “smashed,” the average speed estimate was 40.8 miles per hour; with “contacted,” it was 31.8. In a second experiment a week later, 16 out of 50 people in the “smashed” group said they had seen broken glass. In the “hit” group it was 7 out of 50, and in the control group 6. There was no broken glass in the film at all.

A user interview isn’t a witness interrogation, but the principle is the same: how you ask shapes what people remember and what they tell you. This is closely related to the priming effect, where an earlier stimulus influences how people think and respond afterwards.

Two more forces are at work in every conversation:

• Social desirability: People like to give answers that go down well. If someone notices that you care about an idea, they don’t want to disappoint you.
• Politeness toward the interviewer: Someone who was invited to talk, maybe even paid a small incentive, would rather be friendly than honest when in doubt.

In his book “The Mom Test,” Rob Fitzpatrick sums this up with a memorable image: if you tell your mom about your business idea, she’ll like it, because she likes you. Good interview questions are built so that even your mom can’t lie to you, because the question never asks her to judge the idea in the first place.

Preparation: What do you actually want to know?

A research question, not a wish list

The most common mistake happens long before the first interview: the team doesn’t know exactly what it wants to learn. “We want to understand our customers better” isn’t a goal, it’s an intention. Nielsen Norman Group (NN/g) stresses that an interview is a study with clear goals, not a casual chat or a sales call. Goals that are too broad lead to weak insights.

So write down one or two research questions up front. For the trade business example, that might look like this:

Before: “We want to know whether customers want to create quotes on mobile.”

After: “How, when and where do small trade businesses create quotes today, and at which points does it cost them time or patience?”

The first version tests a solution. The second asks about behavior and the problems behind it. It leaves room for answers nobody on the team expected, and that’s exactly what makes an interview worthwhile.

One important point: interviews are good for understanding experiences, motivations, problems and mental models. They’re bad at evaluating a design. Whether a prototype is easy to understand is something a usability test reveals, where people actually use something. NN/g also points out that interviews rely on self-reported data: memories have gaps, and what people say doesn’t always match what they do. Interviews don’t replace observation or usage data, they complement them.

Finding the right people

Who you talk to matters at least as much as what you ask. For the research question above, you need people in small businesses who actually write quotes themselves. The owner of a large company who hands that off to an office team will tell you a completely different story.

A few practical tips for teams without a research budget:

• Existing customers are a good start, but not the whole picture. Where possible, add people who don’t use your product or who have cancelled.
• A short screener with two or three questions (company size, who writes the quotes, how many per week) filters for suitable participants.
• Don’t just invite your fans. People who regularly send the team praise are easy to book for an interview, but rarely representative.

A discussion guide with a few open questions

An interview guide isn’t a questionnaire you work through line by line. NN/g recommends building it around a few open main questions, with prepared follow-ups underneath. During the conversation you can skip, reorder or add questions.

A guide for the trade business example could be structured like this:

1. Intro (5 minutes): Introduce yourself, explain how the session works, ask for consent to record. An easy first question: “Tell me a bit about your business and your role in it.”
2. Context (10 minutes): “What does a typical week look like for you?”
3. Core (25 minutes): “Tell me about the last quote you wrote. How did it start?” Underneath: follow-ups on place, timing, tools and difficulties.
4. Wrap-up (5 minutes): “Is there anything I didn’t ask that you think is important?” Thanks and next steps.

Before your first real session, do a dry run of the guide with someone from your team. Clunky wording and hidden leading questions show up quickly. NN/g explicitly recommends these pilot runs, but advises against changing the research goals in the middle of a study.

Wording your questions: before and after

The following rules cover most of the traps. Each one comes with an example from the trade business scenario.

Past, not future

Questions about the future invite wishful thinking. People describe who they’d like to be, not who they are. In “Continuous Discovery Habits,” Teresa Torres gives an example: ask people what they would order at a restaurant and they might name the salad. Then they order the burger. That’s why Torres recommends asking about specific past situations, for example with “Tell me about the last time you…”. Fitzpatrick makes it a rule as well: ask about specifics in the past instead of generics or opinions about the future.

Before: “Would you write quotes on your phone?”

After: “Tell me about the last quote you wrote. Where were you at the time?”

If someone drifts into generalities (“Usually I do it like this…”), gently bring them back: “And the last time, specifically?” Memories of one particular occasion contain more detail than descriptions of a “typical” process.

Open, not closed

Closed questions can be answered with yes or no. That’s convenient, but it yields little insight and nudges people toward agreeing. Open questions start with “How,” “What,” “Tell me about” or “Walk me through.”

Before: “Is writing quotes a lot of work for you?”

After: “Walk me through how you write a quote, from the first inquiry to sending it off.”

Closed questions aren’t forbidden. For clarifying facts (“Do you write the quotes yourself?”) they’re perfectly fine. They just don’t work as a way into a topic.

Don’t pack assumptions into the question

Many leading questions hide a claim. Asking “What annoys you most about creating quotes?” assumes that something annoys them. NN/g advises avoiding questions that make assumptions about the participant or sound judgmental.

Before: “What’s the most frustrating part of writing quotes?”

After: “Are there moments when writing a quote takes longer than you expected? Tell me about them.”

Before: “How often do you forget to follow up on a quote?”

After: “What happens after a quote has been sent?”

Watch out for loaded words too. “Easy,” “quick,” “cumbersome” or “modern” all point in a direction. More neutral wording asks about what happened, not about how it is supposed to have felt.

One question at a time

Double questions are a classic sign of nerves: “How do you write quotes, and what software do you use, or do you do it in Excel?” The person often answers only the last part, and the options you offered narrow the answer even further. Ask the open question and stop talking.

Before: “Do you do that on the computer or on paper, or how?”

After: “What do you use to write your quotes?”

Talk about their life, not your idea

As soon as your own solution enters the interview, the conversation tips over. The person starts rating your idea instead of describing their day, and social desirability takes over. That’s why Fitzpatrick’s first rule is: talk about their life instead of your idea.

Before: “We’re thinking about building an app that lets you create quotes on site. What do you think?”

After: “What happens between the on-site visit and the moment the quote goes out?”

The same goes for pricing. “How much would you pay for this?” produces numbers nobody has to stick to. It’s more telling to ask what the problem costs today: How much time goes into it each week? Which tools or help are they already paying for?

If you do want to show a solution, do it at the end of the session and keep it clearly separate from the rest. And treat the reaction as a mood, not as evidence.

During the interview: listen, probe, stay quiet

Set the frame and split the roles

A good interview feels like a relaxed conversation to the participant. That starts with an honest intro: there are no wrong answers, you’re not testing them, and criticism helps the team more than praise. A line like “I didn’t build this product myself, so feel free to be completely honest” helps if it’s true. If it isn’t, leave it out.

If there are two of you, split the roles: one person leads the conversation, the other takes notes. Anyone who asks, listens and types at the same time misses follow-up opportunities. NN/g lists exactly this kind of multitasking as one of the most common interview mistakes. Other observers from the team are welcome, but they should stay silent and pass any questions through the note-taker.

If you want to record the session, ask for consent beforehand and explain what the recording will be used for and when it will be deleted. Recordings contain personal data, so when in doubt, check with whoever handles data protection in your organization about what’s required.

Probing without leading

The most valuable information rarely comes in the first answer. It comes when you dig deeper. Good follow-ups are short, neutral and pick up on what the person just said:

• “Tell me more about that.”
• “What do you mean by ‘cumbersome’?”
• “What happened next?”
• “Can you give me an example?”
• “Why was that important to you?”

A useful technique is mirroring: you repeat the person’s last few words as a question. If someone says “So in the end I’m still sitting in the office in the evening,” a calm “In the evening?” is often enough to keep the story going.

The key is not to slip your own interpretation into the follow-up. “That must have annoyed you, right?” is a leading question dressed up as empathy. “How was that for you?” leaves the answer open.

When people suggest a solution (“You should just add an Excel export”), take it seriously, but keep digging. Torres recommends asking about the need behind it, for example with “What would that do for you?”. Often the request for an export hides a completely different problem, such as coordinating with the accountant.

Getting comfortable with silence

Most people who run interviews talk too much. A pause feels awkward, so it gets filled with a new question or a suggested answer. That’s exactly when leading questions happen.

NN/g recommends deliberately staying quiet after an answer, even past the point where it starts to feel uncomfortable. Often the person will add something on their own, and it’s frequently the most interesting part of the whole conversation. A nod or an “mm-hmm” shows you’re listening without steering.

When it happens anyway

Even with practice, a leading question will slip out at some point. That’s no disaster. If you notice right away, correct yourself: “Actually, that was a bad question. How did that go for you?” If you only notice later, mark the spot in your notes and treat that answer with appropriate caution.

Analysis: from conversations to insights

Capture it right after the session

After each interview, take ten to fifteen minutes while your memory is fresh. Write down what surprised you, which specific situations were described and which verbatim quotes stood out. Keep observation and interpretation apart:

Observation: “Writes quotes in the evening at the office because she needs the wholesaler’s price lists.”

Interpretation: “Mobile quote creation alone probably won’t solve the problem as long as prices aren’t available on the go.”

This separation protects you from a mistake that lurks in analysis just as much as in the interview itself: seeing only what confirms your own hypothesis.

Look for patterns, not favorite quotes

A single strong quote is tempting. But insights only emerge when something repeats across several conversations. A simple method for small teams is affinity mapping: each observation goes on its own note, digital or on paper. Then the team groups the notes by similarity and names the groups.

In the trade business example, groups like “looking up prices,” “coordinating with suppliers” or “following up after sending” might emerge. Maybe mobile quote creation doesn’t show up as a problem at all. That would be a valuable result, even if it’s an inconvenient one.

It matters that several people from the team take part in the analysis. Someone who wasn’t in the interview reads the notes with fresh eyes. And people who helped work out the insights are more likely to trust them. The results can then feed into personas or journey maps that stay with the team in its day-to-day work.

Many of these principles also apply to analyzing usability tests. You’ll find more in the article How to Extract Valuable Feedback from Usability Tests.

How many interviews do you need?

There’s no fixed number. A frequently cited study by Greg Guest, Arwen Bunce and Laura Johnson from 2006 analyzed 60 interviews with women in two West African countries. They found that after the first twelve interviews, hardly any new themes came up. The basic elements of the overarching themes were already visible after six.

That number applies to a fairly homogeneous group and a clearly defined question. For a small product team, it still suggests a rough rule of thumb rather than a hard rule: plan for something like five to ten interviews per clearly defined audience rather than two, and stop when the last two or three interviews don’t bring anything new. If you have several very different groups, such as one-person businesses and companies with an office team, you’ll need more.

Even more effective than a big study is a habit. Torres recommends talking to customers at least once a week. For teams without a research role, that’s often more realistic than a large project every few months. The glossary explains where user research fits in overall and which methods exist besides interviews. If you can watch people at work directly, take a look at contextual inquiry too, which combines the interview with observation on site.

Conclusion

Back to the team with the quoting software. With a clear research question, a guide made of a few open questions and a focus on the last quote someone actually wrote, they would probably have heard after just a few conversations that quotes are written in the evening at the office, and that the real problem is looking up prices. The on-the-go feature would then have been built differently, or not at all.

Good interviews don’t need a research team or a big budget. Above all, they need discipline in how you ask: past instead of future, open instead of closed, their life instead of your idea, and the nerve to stay quiet. The rest is practice. After a few interviews, you’ll hear a leading question before it leaves your mouth.

Checklist

• There’s a specific research question that asks about behavior and problems, not about a solution.
• Participants fit the question and aren’t just happy existing customers.
• The guide consists of a few open main questions with prepared follow-ups and has been piloted once.
• Questions refer to specific situations in the past.
• No question contains an assumption, a judgment or predefined answer options.
• Each question asks about one thing only.
• Your own idea comes up only at the end, or not at all.
• Roles are split: one person asks, one takes notes.
• There is consent for any recording.
• Follow-ups are neutral, and pauses are allowed to last.
• Notes separate observation from interpretation and are written right after each session.
• The analysis looks for patterns across several interviews, with several people from the team.

Sources

• Nielsen Norman Group: User Interviews 101
• Nielsen Norman Group: Five User Interview Mistakes to Avoid
• Nielsen Norman Group: Intentional Silence as a Moderation Technique
• Simply Psychology: Loftus and Palmer (1974) Car Crash Experiment
• Guest, Bunce and Johnson (2006): How Many Interviews Are Enough? Field Methods 18 (1)
• Rob Fitzpatrick: The Mom Test (2013)
• Teresa Torres: Continuous Discovery Habits (2021)