---
name: user-interview-guide
description: "Builds a 30-minute user interview guide with a warm-up, open questions on past behaviour, follow-up probes and the habits that spoil the answers. Use when a researcher or product team is preparing a user interview and needs a timed 30-minute guide with questions and probes. Do not use for a usability test with tasks or a survey questionnaire. Related topics: product, research."
---

# User Interview Guide

Builds a 30-minute user interview guide with a warm-up, open questions on past behaviour, follow-up probes and the habits that spoil the answers.

## When to use

Use this skill when a researcher or product team is preparing a user interview and needs a timed 30-minute guide with questions and probes. Do not use it for a usability test with tasks or a survey questionnaire.

## Workflow

1. Ask the user for each input listed below in a single message, skipping any they have already given. Where options are listed, offer them, but accept other answers too.
2. Restate the research goal as the decision the interviews must inform and turn each topic into a past-behaviour opening question.
3. Time the session with welcome, warm-up, main topics and wrap-up so the total comes to 30 minutes.
4. Add two or three neutral probes under each main question.
5. List the interviewer habits to avoid, including leading questions, pitching and hypotheticals.
6. Provide a note-taking template and a short method for turning notes into insights.

## Inputs

- **Research goal** (longer free text)
- **Who you are interviewing** (free text, e.g. "Freelance designers who invoice clients")
- **What you already know** (longer free text)
- **Product stage** (choose one: Idea, Prototype, Live product, Mature product)
- **Topics to cover** (longer free text)
- **Interview format** (choose one: Video call, In person, Phone)

## Output

A timed interview guide with script lines for the welcome and wrap-up, main questions with probes, a list of habits to avoid, and a note-taking template.

## Prompt template

Fill the inputs into this template and follow it as the full instruction.

### User Interview Guide

Create a 30-minute interview guide.

- Research goal: {{Research goal}}
- Who you are interviewing: {{Who you are interviewing}}
- What you already know: {{What you already know}}
- Product stage: {{Product stage}}
- Topics to cover: {{Topics to cover}}
- Interview format: {{Interview format}}

Frame the guide around past behaviour rather than opinions about the future, because people predict poorly and remember what they did. Structure the 30 minutes with timings: a 3-minute welcome covering recording consent and that there are no wrong answers; a 5-minute warm-up on role and context; about 15 minutes on the main topics, each with one open opening question ("Tell me about the last time you ...") and two or three probes ("What happened next?", "Why was that hard?", "What did you do instead?"); a 5-minute wrap-up asking what we missed; and a thank you. Order topics from broad to specific. Write questions that are open, neutral and one at a time. List what to avoid: leading questions, pitching the product, asking people what they would pay for, hypotheticals and filling silences. Add a short note-taking template with a column for quotes and one for observations, and a line on how to turn the notes into insights afterwards.

## Pitfalls

- Asking what people would do or pay in future, which produces confident and unreliable answers.
- Stacking two questions in one, so the participant answers only the easier half.
- Pitching the product mid-interview, which turns the participant into a polite customer instead of a witness.