Design Interview

/design-interview

Design an interview guide for research with real users, following the interview-guides skill.

Input: $ARGUMENTS

Workflow

1. Resolve the learning goals. If the arguments state them or name a file (an opportunity brief, insight, idea brief, or spec), start there. Otherwise scan product/ for the strongest candidates — the Research agenda rows of product/opportunities/ briefs marked for interviews, what the latest product/research/ file left as "needs primary research", the "why"s a survey analysis raised, open assumptions in ideas/specs, insights marked source: synthetic awaiting verification, hypotheses — propose 2–4 goals and confirm with the user before proceeding.

2. Load context. Read product/overview.md, the personas relevant to the goals, the opportunity brief when there is one (its segment is the participant profile), product/research/, and — if a survey on the same goals has been analyzed — its analysis in product/insights/ for the opt-in pool. Ask who the real participants will be; map them to a persona/segment so the guide's participant profile is concrete.

3. Resolve the mode. Exploration (open discovery) or validation (testing a specific idea/prototype). If not obvious from the goals, ask — one question, two options.

4. Draft the guide per the interview-guides skill: goals with their beliefs-at-risk and falsification notes, funnel structure, non-leading questions with probes, stimulus section only in validation mode.

5. Present and iterate. Walk the user through the goal→question mapping — every question they can't trace to a goal gets cut. Adjust until they own it.

6. Draft the recruitment plan — the guide's closing section: where, how, and how many.

   • Channels: the primary source is the survey respondents who opted in to a conversation, when a survey with the screening + opt-in block exists — selected by their answers, prioritizing those who contradict a belief over those who confirm it (the confirmers teach less). Without a survey, or to fill the gaps: where these participants actually are, named concretely — own customer base, communities, LinkedIn, intercepts, panels — not "social media".
   • Screening: 2–3 screener questions derived from the participant profile, with explicit disqualifiers — data from the wrong people is worse than no data.
   • Target: how many interviews (typically 5–8 per segment; saturation — answers start repeating — beats hitting a quota).

7. Save to product/interview-guides/{YYYY-MM-DD-HHMM}-{slug}.md (timestamp = creation date).

8. Close with next steps in one line each: pretest the guide before it meets real participants (/test-interview-guide — runs the guide against a synthetic persona and diagnoses what breaks), and after the real interviews, bring the transcripts to /extract-insights.

Language

Conversation and the saved guide in the language of the conversation.