Interview Guides

Interview Guides

An interview guide turns what you need to learn into a conversation plan for real users. A good guide is a map, not a script: the interviewer follows the participant's energy and uses the guide to make sure nothing essential goes unasked.

Language

Write the guide in the language of the conversation — and, if different, note the language the interviews themselves will run in.

From goals to questions

Never start from questions. Work down this chain and keep it explicit in the guide:

1. Learning goals — 2–4 things you need to learn or decide. Pull them from real artifacts when they exist: assumptions in an idea brief or spec, synthetic insights awaiting verification, a hypothesis to test.
2. Beliefs at risk — for each goal, what do you currently believe, and what answer would prove you wrong?
3. Questions — each question exists to serve a goal. A question that maps to no goal gets cut, no matter how interesting.

Question craft

• Ask about the past, not the future. "Tell me about the last time you…" beats "would you use…" — people are terrible predictors of their own behavior and generous liars about hypotheticals.
• Open and non-leading. "How do you handle X today?" not "Don't you find X frustrating?". If the question contains the answer you're hoping for, rewrite it.
• Facts and stories over opinions. Specific episodes ("walk me through last Tuesday") surface real workflows; opinions surface politeness.
• Never pitch. The moment the interviewer sells, the participant starts managing the interviewer's feelings and the data dies.
• One thing per question. Split double-barreled questions.

Structure (the funnel)

# Interview guide: {topic}

- **Learning goals:** {2–4, each traceable to an artifact or assumption}
- **Participant profile:** {who qualifies — recruit against a persona/segment}
- **Mode:** exploration | validation
- **Duration:** {target, typically 30–45 min}

## Warm-up (5 min)
Context questions that relax the participant and confirm they fit the profile.

## Main body (per learning goal, ordered general → specific)
For each goal: an opening question, follow-up probes ("what happened next?",
"why was that hard?", "how often?"), and — noted for the interviewer —
what belief this goal tests and what answer would falsify it.

## Stimulus (validation mode only)
When and how to show the idea/prototype — always AFTER the behavioral
questions, so the pitch can't contaminate them. Reaction questions that
ask for objections, not praise.

## Wrap-up (5 min)
"What should I have asked?", referrals to other participants, thanks.

## Recruitment plan
Where these participants are (channels, named concretely — survey opt-ins
first when a survey exists, chosen by their answers, contradictors before
confirmers), how they're screened (screener questions with disqualifiers),
and how many interviews to run.

Quality bar

• Every question traces to a learning goal; every goal traces to a decision you'll make with the answer.
• Fits the duration: ~1 main question plus probes per 5 minutes. A 30-minute guide with 20 questions is a survey read aloud.
• The falsification note per goal is written down — interviewers hear what they hope for unless the guide says what "we were wrong" sounds like.
• In validation mode, behavior questions come strictly before the stimulus.
• The recruitment plan is concrete: named channels (not "social media"), survey opt-ins as the first source when they exist — prioritizing respondents whose answers contradict a belief — screeners with explicit disqualifiers, saturation over quota.

Pretesting the guide

A guide is a draft until it has been run. Pretesting means running it end to end — against a colleague, a friendly participant, or a synthetic persona — and reading the answers for evidence that the questions are broken. The failures below are visible in the answers, which is why a dry run finds them and a re-read doesn't:

Fix the two or three highest-impact defects and re-run. Revise the guide in place: a pretest doesn't create a new guide, it improves the one you have.

What a pretest cannot tell you. It validates structure, not reception. A synthetic persona in particular will be more articulate, more cooperative, and more self-aware than any real participant, so it under-detects confusion, guardedness, and questions that simply fall flat. Treat structural findings as reliable and everything else as a hypothesis about the guide.

Anti-patterns

• Questions that begin with "would you" / "do you think you'd…" — speculation, not evidence
• A script to recite instead of a map to navigate — probes matter more than the planned questions
• Guides with no participant profile (data from the wrong people is worse than no data)
• Asking for feature opinions ("do you like it?") instead of objections and current behavior
• Skipping the wrap-up referral question — recruiting the next participants is part of the interview