What are techniques and best practices to reduce question / interviewer bias when gathering qualitative insights (surveys / interviews) from your market?

There are so many best practices here! We’ll name the ones most top-of-mind, but please know this is not an exhaustive list. It seems simple, in theory, to conduct a research interview. It’s just asking questions, right? But moderators spend years learning and perfecting their craft.

1. Screening
1. Lean into your champions, not your haters. Find respondents who have a real need in the space and who don’t already have negative feelings towards your brand. These people will give you the feedback you need to differentiate yourself in the space.
2. Be sure to listen to a diverse set of voices when you conduct research. Ensure a good mix of age, race/ethnicity, gender, etc.
2. Create a safe space, no right or wrong answers. I like to say, “The best way to help me out today is by giving your open and honest opinion.”
3. Ask questions in order of least specific to most specific and save any concepts or ideas to evaluate for the end of the interview or survey. That way you won’t bias the respondent up front with your ideas.
4. Ask questions that don’t have a right or wrong answer. For example, don't ask “Which is the best HR platform?” because there could be an objective right or wrong answer. Instead, ask, “Which is your favorite HR platform and why?” because then you’re asking for a response based on their personal experience rather than what they think the right answer is. Anchor questions to experiences, attitudes, wants, and needs. If questions are based to factual responses, the respondent will focus on being “right” more than being honest.
5. Similarly, don’t ask respondents what they want you to build for them. That’s your job. Instead, ask them what’s going well and what could be better with their experience in the marketplace. Listen for pain points that your organization could act on.
6. Seems obvious, but don’t word questions in a really biased way, e.g. “How much do you love this product?” or “Which of the ideas is your favorite?” Instead try, “How interested are you in using this product? Why, why not?”
7. Listen. It’s tempting to give way too much context or correct respondents when you feel like they don’t understand an idea fully. But instead of jumping in to correct, see if you can instead ask them more about their perspective.
8. Bonnie’s pro tip: Go watch really good interviewers get their subjects to open up and hone in on a core source of truth. Listen to when they speak (and don’t speak). Pay attention to how they ask follow-up questions. Note their body language. Watch how the interviewee responds to different cues. Oprah is truly one of the best. Re-watch some of her greatest interviews and pay close attention. I imagine there might be a point where analyzing X number of Oprah interviews is the equivalent of a RIVA certification (I said what I said).
9. Sophia’s pro tip: Using “Why?” as your go-to probe (aka follow-up question) will start to feel like an interrogation after a while. Try to mix it up with probes like, “Tell me more about that,” “Keep going,” “Can you give me an example,” etc.
10. Patti’s pro tip: Be empathetic. It’s not enough to say there are no right or wrong answers. You must truly conduct the interview with an open mind and be curious to learn about the respondent’s perspective. You’ll know you’ve made a connection if they start sharing not just their opinions, but their experiences and emotions too.

One way to do this is to lean into surveys—where you won’t have direct contact with your audience. But even then you’ll need to strip questions down to very specific structures. If you look up System Usability Survey for example, you’ll find specific guidelines for framing and repeating questions to better under customer user experience.

Wynter also provides precise templates for jobs to be done and value surveys.

However, this is also why win/loss and jobs to be done vendors are so useful (and so expensive). They’re trained to reduce bias as much as possible.