How User Interviews Bring Voice of the Customers into their Product Development using Grain

The research team at User Interviews leads strategic research studies to understand how users experience the product, discover the problems they encounter, and gather actionable feedback to inform product development and roadmap.

We sat down with Roberta Dombrowski, VP of User Research at User Interviews to learn how her team leverages Grain to make sure insights from their research calls get shared with the right teams.

Building a Feedback Loop for Product Development

Almost all of the research team’s user interviews happen on Zoom. The challenge was that valuable user insights were stuck in meeting notes or hour-long recordings, making them difficult to share.

The friction prevented researchers from sharing feedback as often as they should.

“Before Grain, I would just use Zoom to record the customer calls. But you wouldn’t be able to clip the feedback and share it immediately. So, that’s where it would stop.”

- Roberta Dombrowski, VP of User Research, User Interviews.

Even when researchers share recording files, product teams on the receiving end wouldn’t have the time to scour and process feedback from hour-long calls.

Roberta agrees, “We wanted a tool to quickly clip and share information with the rest of the team. That way we can make sure insights we are learning are being shared and teams could make decisions on them.”

Soon, Grain became the companion researchers need to share insights from their user interviews. “We’ll turn on Grain to clip and take notes while we are recording the interviews”, says Roberta.

After every interview, researchers share the insights captured in the form of Grain highlights to the right teams on Slack.

“If I have a study where I meet with eight different customers, as soon as I get off the call with the first customer, I'll usually send a slack message with some of the Grain clips. I review and share Grain clips after every customer interview.”

Using the Customer’s Voice to Tell a Narrative

Sharing highlights from customer interviews don’t just stop at Slack. The research teams at User Interviews create complications of highlights in Miro boards and presentations to tell a powerful narrative. Instead of having to explain their research and risking bias, they let the voice of the customer shine through.

Miro Interview Snapshots

After every interview, Roberta and her team of researchers analyze and share a “buyer’s journey map” that maps out the steps users take on their way to becoming a customer. Each step in their journey is represented with a combination of sticky notes and Grain highlights.

“My team really loves when I embed the Grain highlights. For example, when a customer talks about a specific part of their [buying] journey, I’ll clip and embed the video. It’s super easier for them to review”, adds Roberta.

Roberta sends these “Miro interview snapshots” after she meets with every customer. Embedding Grain highlights tends to have a massive impact on what stakeholders and product owners take away from the Miro board.

Customers’ Voice on Google Slides

At the end of each study, the research team puts together a presentation on Google Slides to share the findings with the stakeholders. To make the final presentation compelling, they bring in the voice of the customers using Grain.

Rather than having text-heavy presentations, the team uses Grain to leverage the power of video, which in turn, captures attention and makes it easier for stakeholders to empathize with the customers.

As Grain highlights are downloadable, researchers can download any specific moment from their interview as a short video clip and upload it to their presentations seamlessly.

Influence Roadmap with User Stories

With real-time clipping, Grain enables the research team at User Interviews to unlock and share insights from their customer interviews with the rest of the company—through Slack, Notion, Miro, and more. Put it another way, Roberta and her team now leverage the power of video to align product and engineering teams around the real customer needs.

Try Grain to capture and share customer insights and drive better product decisions.