---
name: interview-guides
description: How to design an interview guide (discussion guide) for real user research — from learning goals to open, non-leading questions, funnel structure, and probes. Use when designing an interview, writing interview questions, preparing a discussion guide, or planning research conversations with real users.
---

# 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)

```markdown
# 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; when that survey has a Distribution section, reference it as
the upstream source instead of repeating its channels, and name own
channels only for what it doesn't cover), 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, and referencing the survey's Distribution section rather than duplicating its channels — 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:

| Defect | How it shows up in the answers |
| ------ | ------------------------------ |
| **Speculation** | The answer is a prediction ("I'd probably…"), not a memory. The question asked about the future. |
| **Leading** | The answer reuses the question's own words and agrees with its premise. |
| **Double-barreled** | Only half the question gets answered — usually the easier half. |
| **Abstract or jargon wording** | A generic, category-level answer with no episode in it. |
| **Redundant** | The second question harvests the answer already given to the first. |
| **Dead end** | A one-liner with nowhere to go, because no probe was written for it. |
| **Missing probe** | The interesting thing appears in the answer and the guide moves on. |
| **Priming** | An early question plants a frame, and every later answer is shaped by it. |
| **Mistimed sensitivity** | A question about money, failure, or status lands before enough trust exists; the answer turns guarded or performative. |
| **Coverage gap** | A learning goal that no answer touched — or an answer that serves no goal, meaning the question should be cut. |
| **Overrun** | The run doesn't fit the stated duration. Cut questions rather than plan to rush. |

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