User Interview Guide & Template
A practical framework for understanding your users' real needs, motivations, and pain points.
User Interviews are the tool you use to close that gap.
When you’re stuck, it’s often because you're designing solutions for yourself, not your user. In modern organisations, the people who invent, build, and market a product are often different from the people who actually use it. This distance creates significant risk.
You might feel like your team is working hard but the product isn't landing. You're drowning in quantitative data (the what), but you're missing the deep, qualitative insights (the why). You're measuring activity, but you can't connect it to real user value.
A user interview is a structured, in-depth conversation where one person asks questions and the other provides answers. It is a qualitative research method designed to gather rich, deep information about a user's experiences.
Unlike surveys, which capture broad quantitative data, interviews provide attitudinal data which is your customer's feelings, motivations, and opinions. They help you uncover the emotional and contextual aspects of an experience, revealing the real problems behind surface-level symptoms.
What is a User Interview?
Why use User Interviews?
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Uncover the "Why" and go beyond what users do and understand why they do it, uncovering the real problems that need solving.
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Reduce risk and close the distance between your team and your end-users, reducing guesswork and the risk of building the wrong thing.
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Gain deep insights to capture rich, qualitative insights into the emotional and contextual aspects of your users' experiences.
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Conducting interviews early helps you identify valuable risks and opportunities you would have otherwise missed
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Use concrete stories and quotes from real users to build shared understanding and buy-in for your strategy across the organisation to create alignment and buy-in.
Our guide provides the complete structure and script for running effective 45-60 minute interview sessions.
How to use This Guide: The framework is broken into four key parts.
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Introduction (5 mins)
Welcome the participant, introduce your purpose, confirm confidentiality, and get consent to record.
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Warm Up and Background (5 mins)
Build rapport with ice-breakers and background questions like, "Tell me about yourself" and "What are your main goals when using products like this?"
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Core Questions (35 mins)
This is the heart of the interview. Use our open-ended, probing questions to dig into specific stories. You'll focus on questions like, "Walk me through the last time you..." , "What challenges did you face?" , and "Tell me more about that".
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Wrap Up (5 mins)
Thank the participant, ask for any final thoughts ("Anything else you'd like to share?" or "Is there anything I didn't ask you about?" ), and see if they have any questions for you.
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Define your research objectives and participant criteria.
Recruit representative users from your target segments.
Develop your interview protocol, including how you'll handle consent and confidentiality.
Schedule participants, offering a wide range of times.
Train your data collectors, clearly defining the roles of Interview Lead (facilitates, asks questions, manages time ) and Notetaker (documents responses, captures key quotes ).
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Transcribe and analyse your interview recordings.
Extract key quotes, insights, and observations.
Identify patterns and key themes across all interviews.
Synthesise your findings using a tool like Affinity Mapping.
Develop preliminary user personas based on your new, deep insights.
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Affinity Mapping (to synthesise your interview data)
Personas (to create user archetypes from your findings)
Contextual Inquiry (to observe users in their own environment)
Surveys (to validate your qualitative findings quantitatively)
Ready to stop guessing and start understanding what your customers really need?
This guide is a key part of our Stakeholder Research and Insights module which is part of our Impact Essentials service. Where we create a pathway to get you closer to scaling the impact that you desire. In this particular module we don't just hand you a template; we provide hands-on coaching to equip your team with the knowledge, tools, and confidence to run effective interviews yourselves.