User research for a product users have never used

Question

I am designing a health tracker app for the users in my organisation and I am planning to interview users in order to understand them more.

However, these users have never used such an application before. In such case, what kind of questions should I ask them in order to understand their goals, behaviors and preferences?

Answer 1

I am lazy and this has been done before, so I highly encourage you to read this: http://hci.stanford.edu/courses/dsummer/handouts/NeedFinding.pdf

I think it answers all your questions.

To summarize:

Find your users: the average user, the extreme user, the casual user, the expert on the subject ...

Ask questions:

• Be as open-ended as possible
• Let the people educate you:
• Ask people for comparisons instead of evaluating on an absolute scale
• Avoid personal bias, because people are not very good at self reporting
• Be concrete

Good examples:

• “I don’t really understand coffee chemistry. As a food chemist, can you explain to me how coffee ‘works’?”
• "How much did you exercice this week?"

Bad examples:

• "Is the daily update an important feature to you?"
• "Would you like something more intuitive?"
• "How often do you exercice?"

Answer 2

In addition, you should determine more precisely what you mean by "understand them more". Differents methods leads you to differents observations.

If you're looking for needs, I think too that the previous link will answer most of your questions.

If you want to understand their behaviors or preferences with your application, you might choose user testing and observation with interviews.