A structured or semi-structured document that outlines the topics, questions, and prompts a researcher uses during a user interview. A good guide begins with open-ended, context-setting questions and progresses toward more specific topics — ensuring sessions are consistent enough to compare across participants while remaining flexible enough for unexpected insights to emerge.
Common contexts
- Preparing a discovery study guide for a new feature area where the team has no existing user data
- Sharing a draft guide with a cross-functional team before fieldwork so stakeholders can add topics without derailing sessions
- Reviewing session recordings against the guide to identify which questions consistently produced shallow answers
Use when
Write the guide collaboratively with the product team so their burning questions are included — this builds research buy-in and prevents stakeholders from dismissing findings they didn't help shape.
Avoid when
Don't treat it as a rigid script to be read verbatim — a guide followed without listening produces data that answers the questions on the page rather than the questions that matter.
The best questions you'll ask in an interview are usually the follow-ups you couldn't have planned — the guide's real job is to free your attention so you can hear the unexpected.
Real-world examples
- Airbnb's research team maintains a shared library of interview guides for recurring study types (host onboarding, guest discovery), ensuring cross-researcher consistency and longitudinal comparability.
- The UK Government Digital Service publishes open-source interview guide templates adopted by 27 government departments, standardising question framing across a fragmented public-sector research community.
- Spotify's user-research guild uses a 5-question core guide plus 15 optional probes for its quarterly listener studies, letting researchers adapt depth without sacrificing comparable data.