Customer interviews: our field notes

Why this comes up

Every month a client asks us about customer interviews. The short answer is: start smaller than you think.

No jargon, no tool worship. Just the order we do things in and why.

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The parts people skip

Budget attention, not just money. Customer interviews works when one person owns it and reviews it weekly for a month. After that it mostly runs itself.

Almost every failure we have seen with customer interviews traces back to skipping the boring middle: naming things clearly, writing the confirmation message, testing on a real phone with real thumbs.

Where things usually break

The best examples of customer interviews are boring on purpose. Clear words, obvious next step, nothing blinking. Personality lives in the copy and the photography, not in animation for its own sake.

Keep a short log of what you changed and what happened. Six months of notes about customer interviews is worth more than any course.

Keeping it alive after launch

Write down the single outcome you want from customer interviews before touching a tool. One sentence. If you cannot write it, the project is not ready — and no amount of design will rescue a fuzzy goal.

Pick one number to watch. For customer interviews it is usually completed actions — bookings, orders, replies — not visits. Visits flatter you; completions pay you.

• ✓Alt text on every meaningful image
• ✓A backup and a way to restore it
• ✓A support path that answers within a day
• ✓The single action you want from a visitor
• ✓A price or a range, in plain numbers
• ✓Proof: reviews, photos, real names
• ✓One sentence describing who this is for

A workflow that survives real weeks

Plan the second month while you are planning launch week. Customer interviews that nobody owns after launch decays quietly, and decay is harder to sell to your team than a fresh build.

Write for the person who is tired, on a bus, on a cracked screen. If customer interviews works for them it works for everyone else too.

What we would do differently

Customers judge customer interviews in about five seconds. They are asking three silent questions: what is this, is it for me, what happens if I tap the button. Answer them above the fold.

Price it end to end. A cheap start plus a year of patching is rarely cheaper than getting customer interviews right the first time, and the patching arrives when you are busiest.

Questions people ask

How long does customer interviews usually take?

For a small business, expect one to three weeks of real work once content is ready. The waiting is almost always content, not build time.

Do I need to be technical to handle customer interviews?

No. You need to make decisions and supply real information. We handle domains, hosting, deployment and the technical maintenance.

Can we change things later?

Yes. Every build ships with revisions, and you own the domain, the content and the finished product outright.