interview-guide

name	interview-guide
description	Create a user interview guide that explores real behavior, context, motivations, workarounds, constraints, and decision processes without leading participants toward the team's preferred answer.

Interview Guide

Use when qualitative interviews need enough structure for comparable evidence without becoming a rigid questionnaire.

Procedure

1. Start from the research questions and identify what past or current behavior could provide evidence for each.
2. Open with context and recent concrete experiences before asking for opinions, preferences, or hypothetical future behavior.
3. Write neutral prompts that invite description rather than agreement and avoid embedding product language or desired outcomes.
4. Prepare probes for sequence, frequency, triggers, alternatives, tradeoffs, workarounds, emotional or organizational context, and consequences.
5. Ask for examples and artifacts when participants make broad claims such as always, never, difficult, important, or expensive.
6. Keep sensitive topics optional and explain data handling when the research context requires it.
7. Order topics from easy context toward deeper or evaluative material while preserving flexibility to follow useful unexpected evidence.
8. Pilot the guide and remove questions that consistently produce vague, leading, duplicated, or irrelevant answers.

Decision rules

• Ask what participants did before asking what they think they would do.
• Silence and follow-up probes often produce better evidence than reading every prepared question.
• Do not correct participant terminology during discovery unless misunderstanding blocks the interview.
• The guide supports the researcher; it should not prevent following relevant evidence.

Quality gate

The guide is ready when prompts trace to research questions, leading and hypothetical wording is minimized, concrete behavior and context can be explored deeply, sensitive data handling is appropriate, and the structure remains flexible enough to follow meaningful participant evidence.