Interview guide

An interview guide is the interviewer’s plan for one type of session: the topics to cover, the main questions under each, and a few follow-up prompts. It is a guide, not a script. Its purpose is to make sure the same ground is covered with every participant while leaving room to follow what is interesting.

Typical structure

Begin with a warm-up that is easy to answer and shows the person that there are no wrong answers. Move through the main topics from broad to specific. Finish with a wrap-up that asks what you did not ask about, which often produces the best material in the hour.

Good questions and bad ones

Ask about the past, not the hypothetical. “Tell me about the last time you booked a trip” gives you behaviour. “Would you use a feature that did this?” gives you politeness. Keep questions open and neutral, and prepare plain follow-ups such as “what happened next?” and “why was that?”, which do most of the work.

Common mistakes

Writing too much. Twenty-five questions in a 45-minute slot turns the session into a questionnaire and the interviewer into a reader. Aim for five to eight main questions.

Never testing it. Run the guide once with a colleague. You will find the question that confuses people and the one that leads them, before a real participant does.

The guide sits beneath the research plan, which says why the interviews are happening at all.