Essay · About a 10 minute read

The Right Number of User Interviews

Mitchel Seaman · Medium Free Beginner

Most founders either stop at two chats with friendly users or interview forever and never ship. Seaman, a UX researcher, gives you a concrete starting formula (begin at 5, add more for complex domains, multiply by personas) and a clear stop signal: when interviews start repeating and stop teaching you anything new, that is saturation and it is time to move. It reframes the real question from a magic number to noticing when you have stopped learning.

  • Start around 5 interviews per persona and add more only if the domain is genuinely complex or the users vary a lot.
  • The point to stop is saturation: when new conversations mostly echo what you already heard, more interviews are wasted time.
  • There is no single correct number, so treat any count as a planning tool, not a target to hit before you are allowed to build.
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The question it answers

  1. How many customer conversations should I do before I start building versus building a rough version to learn faster?

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