How to avoid false positives during User Interviews

I have been guilty of this on numerous occasions. As interviewers, we want the ideas we are validating to work out.

We invested hours, maybe weeks, thinking about our ideas.

Because we are so invested, we fall victim to “happy-ears-syndrome”.

Happy Ears Syndrome: Hearing only what you want to hear

The more “scientific” term here: False Positive

Common symptoms of Happy Ears Syndrome include:
1. Imaginary customer pain
2. Abnormally optimistic founders
3. Terrible headaches (after product launches)

Jokes aside, why does this happen?

My hypothesis:

It’s because we stop searching and probing after we identified the first instance of pain.

What does that mean?

During user interviews, we are trained to look for pain.

If there is no pain present, we do pretty well classifying our initial hypothesis as “inaccurate”.

It’s the murky area that trips us up.

Diving into the Murky Area

In order to prevent “happy-ears-syndrome”, let’s add some clarity to this scale:

In most cases, we don’t have Intense Pain in our lives.

If we do, we tend to take care of them pretty quickly. It’s the “mild-to-throbbing” pains that we tend to ignore.

BUT

How do we look for these during user interviews?

One thing we could try is mapping it against a buyer’s journey. It’s actually quite a fair assumption that we tend to know of or purchased solutions for more painful problems.

Mapping it to Evidence

Now, you can look for corresponding evidence.

Notice that each layer of evidence builds upon the first.
(1) It’s not enough that they know they have a problem.
(2) Did they search on Google or ask a friend for solutions?
(3) Did they invest time to look for a solution?
(4) Did they invest money to look for a solution?

In each layer, you are looking for more investment in solving this problem. If you stopped at the first instance of pain, you might not have properly validated if they are willing to pay for a solution.

Pro-Tip

If they can’t name a single solution, it is usually not a problem

A Google Search is free, fast, and commitment-free.

If someone tells you that they have a problem and cannot name a single solution (when all they had to do was Google), it is not a problem.

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