The easiest way to ruin a user interview is one question: "Would you use a feature that does X?"
Almost everyone says yes. They are being polite, they don't want to disappoint you, and saying yes costs them nothing. Your validation is compromised before the interview has started.
People are poor predictors of their own future behaviour. They are good historians of what they did last week. Good interviews are built on that difference. Rob Fitzpatrick's book The Mom Test is the best-known treatment of the idea, and the principle is simple: ask about specific past behaviour, not hypothetical future choices.
The second column cannot be answered with a polite yes. It forces a story, and stories contain the details that matter: the tool they actually used, the step that annoyed them, the workaround they invented.
A workaround is the strongest evidence of a real problem. It shows someone cared enough to fix it themselves.
In Nigerian small businesses, common workarounds include keeping a paper notebook alongside a POS terminal, asking customers to send a screenshot as proof of a transfer, or running a business entirely through WhatsApp status updates and DMs. Each of these points to a gap a product could fill. When you hear one, slow down and ask: "Why do you do it that way? What happens if you don't?"
A problem that costs nothing will not be paid for. Follow every complaint with a cost question:
If the answer to the last question is "nothing", treat the problem as low priority, however loudly it was described.
Most interviewers fill silences. Don't. After an answer, wait three or four seconds. People often add the most honest detail after the pause, once they've stopped performing the tidy version of the story.
Cohort participants run interviews with real people, not classmates playing a role. They bring back notes, and mentors check them for leading questions before anyone concludes. It is the fastest way we know to unlearn the "would you use this?" habit.
Want to learn research by doing it? See when the next Culmino Labs cohort opens.
Next read: What an MVP Really Is, and the Three Mistakes That Kill Most of Them.
