When you create a user interview guide for UX research, start with the decision your conversations need to inform. “What do our users want?” is often too broad. “How do workshop staff reschedule appointments, and where is information lost?” gives the conversation direction without treating a new feature as the answer in advance.
This guide includes a conversation structure, example interview questions and a worked analysis. Download the fillable interview guide PDF and edit it in a PDF reader. A plain-text template (Markdown) is also available if you want to develop the sections in your own document.
What belongs in a UX interview guide?
A guide records the experiences you want to understand, the people who can describe them and the topics the conversation should cover. It also leaves room for follow-up questions. When someone describes an unexpected workaround, you need to be able to explore it rather than rush to the next question on your list.
Use the following overview to connect your research with the conversation. You can go through it with your team before the first interview.
| Section | What to prepare | Why it matters |
|---|---|---|
| Decision | What do you need to decide after the interviews? | This gives the answers a clear purpose. |
| Research question | Which workflow or experience do you need to understand? | It focuses the topic without suggesting a solution to participants. |
| Participants | Who has experienced the situation themselves? | A specific account offers more to explore than guesses about other people. |
| Introduction | How will you explain the purpose, format and use of notes? | Participants know what to expect and what choices they have. |
| Core questions | Which open questions will help reconstruct a past event? | You get a connected account rather than isolated opinions. |
| Follow-ups | Where do you need examples, people involved or missing information? | These details help your team understand the findings. |
| Closing | What should participants add, and what happens next? | Unresolved points and next steps remain clear. |
NN/g’s guide to preparing UX interviews explains how research questions, open interview questions and prepared follow-ups fit together. This article uses an original workshop example so you can work through the preparation and analysis yourself.
Turn the research question into a conversation
Suppose you are developing a scheduling system for a workshop. Customers call to move their appointments, and the team thinks an automatic confirmation might help. Before planning that feature, you want to understand how changes are handled today and how staff know that a change is complete.
Your research question is: How does an appointment change move from the incoming call to confirmation? Rather than ask for an abstract process description, invite the participant to recall the most recent change they handled. Together, you can reconstruct what happened first, what information was available and where somebody had to wait.
When recruiting research participants, their experience of the task matters. Someone who handles these changes can answer different questions from someone who decides which software to buy. If you need both perspectives, prepare the conversations accordingly.
Example questions for a user interview
Adapt these questions to your own workflow. Replace “appointment change” with an event your participants can actually remember, such as their last order or a support case.
| Conversation phase | Core question | Possible follow-up |
|---|---|---|
| Opening | What is your role in appointment planning? | Who do you coordinate with? |
| Specific event | Think of the most recent appointment change you handled. How did it reach you? | What did you already know at that point? |
| Sequence | What did you do next? | What information or tools did you need? |
| Handover | Who else needed to know about the change? | How did you find out whether the information had reached them? |
| Difficulty | Was there anything you had to clarify during this change? | What did you try, and what happened then? |
| Completion | How did you know the change was complete? | Was anything still unresolved? |
| Closing | What matters for these changes that we have not discussed? | Is there another case that works very differently? |
The order follows the event so the participant does not have to keep switching between situations. If they explain a later step without prompting, follow that account and return to any gaps afterwards. The guide supports the conversation.
Ask neutral follow-up questions
“Was the confusing software the problem?” already contains your suspected cause. “What did you need to clarify at that point?” gives the participant room to explain whether the difficulty involved software, an outstanding approval or something else. If the answer is brief, ask about the next step or an example rather than supply an explanation yourself.
| A question that leads | A more open follow-up |
|---|---|
| Would you use an automatic confirmation? | How was the customer informed about this change? |
| Would a better overview make that easier? | How did you find out what was still outstanding? |
| That must have taken a long time? | What happened between the follow-up question and confirmation? |
| So you missed the message? | When did you notice the message, and what did you do next? |
Agreement can influence the conversation too. Immediately calling a workaround “awkward” signals the account you expect to hear. Instead, summarise your understanding of the sequence and invite the participant to correct it. Record estimated times as estimates; measuring processing time would require a different approach.
Turn the account into a design question
Suppose the participant explains that they enter a changed appointment in the calendar and leave a note beside it as a reminder to call the customer. They remove the note after the call. This suggests a question worth investigating: the calendar may already show the change even though confirmation is still outstanding.
Keep the connection visible in your notes:
| Account from the example | Your interpretation | What to investigate next |
|---|---|---|
| A note is used to remember the outstanding call. | The calendar may not represent the pending confirmation. | How do other staff keep track of this task? |
| The note is removed after the call. | “Appointment changed” and “customer informed” are different states in the workflow. | Should the interface make these states separately visible? |
This does not yet establish how common the problem is or which feature to build. Compare the other interviews and consider whether they support the same explanation. You can then design the outstanding states and investigate the interface with suitable usability-test tasks.
Try the guide before using it in research
A pilot helps you find out whether the opening question is understandable, the follow-ups work together and the conversation fits its intended format. Ask someone to describe a suitable past event. You may discover that a question mixes two issues or that a term is only familiar to your project team. Revise these points before interviewing the actual participants.
The PDF template has fields for your research question, participant profile, interview questions and analysis. You can identify participants with internal codes in your notes. Agree consent, recordings and access arrangements for your particular study; the worksheet is not a consent form.
If you would like support with preparation and delivery, our UX research interviews describe the service scope. For an existing interface, usability testing may be the more suitable approach. The medienkundig and Bridagency projects show how we connect research and design.
