| name | ux-interview-guide |
| description | Design semi-structured research interview guides for product, UX, and usability work. Use when Codex needs to turn research goals into a practical interview plan, define who should be interviewed and why, structure a session into warm-up, core questions, and probes, reduce bias in wording and moderation, and produce a guide that a researcher can actually use in the room. |
UX Interview Guide
Overview
Turn research goals into a semi-structured interview guide that can be run with real participants. Start by writing the study plan, define the participant profile and learning goals, structure the session, draft questions and probes, add moderation safeguards, then report the final guide with rationale and usage notes.
This skill is not survey design and not general brainstorming. The job is to produce an interview guide that is aligned to learning goals, appropriate for the participant type, and robust enough to use without leading people into scripted answers.
Workflow
- Write the study plan before drafting questions.
- Record the product or topic, study goal, participant profile, interview context, and desired output.
- Decide whether the interview is exploratory, evaluative, contextual, retrospective, or mixed.
- Read study-plan.md and use its template.
- Lock the learning goals and participant fit.
- Define what you need to learn and what kind of participant can answer it.
- Separate participant-screening logic from interview questions.
- Do not draft questions before the learning goals are explicit.
- Read learning-goals-and-participants.md.
- Structure the session before polishing wording.
- Build the interview arc: opening, warm-up, topic blocks, probes, wrap-up, and optional artifacts or tasks.
- Allocate time and decide which questions are core versus optional.
- Read session-structure.md.
- Draft questions and probes tied to goals.
- Write questions that elicit concrete behaviors, decisions, workarounds, expectations, and pain points.
- Add follow-up probes that deepen understanding without changing the answer space.
- Read question-design-and-probes.md.
- Check bias, leading language, and moderation risks.
- Remove yes-no traps, double-barreled questions, jargon, and solution-leading wording.
- Add moderator notes for neutral follow-up and recovery when the conversation stalls or drifts.
- Read bias-and-moderation.md.
- Use sub-agents only after the study frame is stable.
- Keep study goals, participant fit, final question logic, and final guide structure with the main agent.
- Delegate bounded subtasks such as reviewing one question block or stress-testing probe depth.
- Require structured feedback, not free-form rewriting.
- Read subagent-protocol.md.
- Report the guide as a usable field artifact.
- Return the study frame, participant profile, full interview guide, moderator notes, and rationale.
- Make the output ready to use or lightly adapt for a real session.
- Read reporting-schema.md.
Operating Rules
- Every main question should map to a learning goal.
- Prefer concrete behavioral questions over opinion-only questions when possible.
- Keep screening criteria separate from interview questions.
- Design for moderation, not just for reading; the guide should help a human researcher stay flexible and neutral.
- Mark optional probes and time-sensitive cuts clearly.
- If a learning goal cannot be answered well by interview alone, say so instead of forcing bad questions.
Read These References When Needed
