{"site":{"name":"Koji","description":"AI-native customer research platform that helps teams conduct, analyze, and synthesize customer interviews at scale.","url":"https://www.koji.so","contentTypes":["blog","documentation"],"lastUpdated":"2026-05-15T14:58:58.070Z"},"content":[{"type":"documentation","id":"ddb60b63-50ed-4f96-adb5-ca76490248bc","slug":"pre-interview-preparation-checklist","title":"Pre-Interview Preparation: The 24-Hour Checklist Before Every User Interview","url":"https://www.koji.so/docs/pre-interview-preparation-checklist","summary":"The complete 24-hour preparation checklist for any user interview, broken into research, participant, logistics, and personal-readiness buckets. Includes a printable one-page version and how Koji automates discussion guide creation, participant context, transcription, and consent.","content":"# Pre-Interview Preparation: The 24-Hour Checklist Before Every User Interview\n\nThe hour before a user interview decides the quality of that interview. Skip the prep and you waste a participant's time and your own. Run the prep checklist and the conversation flows, the recording works, and the insights are sharp by the time it ends.\n\nThis guide gives you a complete 24-hour checklist for preparing for any user interview — moderated or AI-moderated, remote or in-person — and shows how AI-native research platforms like Koji eliminate most of the manual prep work so you can focus on the conversation, not the logistics.\n\n## Why Pre-Interview Prep Matters More Than You Think\n\nMost failed user interviews do not fail because of bad questions. They fail because of broken tech, missing context, no clear research goal, or a moderator who arrived too tired to listen. Nielsen Norman Group research on interview failure modes specifically warns: \"Avoid scheduling all interview sessions back-to-back with no breaks; interviewing is tiring, and without breaks your later interviews will be of poor quality.\"\n\nPre-interview prep covers four buckets:\n\n1. **Research prep** — do you know what you are trying to learn?\n2. **Participant prep** — do you know who you are talking to?\n3. **Logistics prep** — will the tech work?\n4. **Personal prep** — are you ready to listen?\n\nEach bucket has a checklist. Run all four every time.\n\n## The 24-Hour Checklist\n\n### 24 hours before: Research prep\n\n**☐ Re-read the research brief.** The [research brief](/docs/research-brief-template) defines the research question. Read it again. If you cannot articulate the primary question in one sentence, you are not ready to interview.\n\n**☐ Review the discussion guide.** Read the [discussion guide](/docs/discussion-guide-template) end to end. Note which questions are essential (\"must ask\") vs. optional (\"ask if time\"). In a 45-minute interview you will typically get through 5-7 deep questions, not 20 shallow ones.\n\n**☐ Note your hypotheses.** What do you currently believe the answer will be? Write down 2-3 specific predictions. After the interview, you will check which ones held up. This is how you avoid confirmation bias — by stating your priors explicitly so you can be wrong out loud.\n\n**☐ Check your bias list.** What outcome do you secretly want? Awareness of this is the first defense against leading questions and other [research bias](/docs/research-bias-guide).\n\n### 6 hours before: Participant prep\n\n**☐ Read the participant screener responses.** If you do not know what role this person has, how long they have been a customer, and what segment they are in, you will waste the first 10 minutes asking questions you should already have answered.\n\n**☐ Look up account context.** For B2B research, check: account size, plan tier, tenure, feature usage. For B2C, check: signup date, last-seen date, key events. The goal is to enter the interview already curious about specific behaviors — not asking generic warmup questions.\n\n**☐ Note any specific anomalies.** Did this customer file a recent ticket? Drop usage three weeks ago? Cancel and re-subscribe? Anomalies are interview gold; surface them in advance so you remember to probe.\n\n**☐ Customize the opening.** Generic \"tell me about yourself\" wastes 5 minutes. Personalized opening — \"I see you have been using us for 18 months and recently switched to the team plan; I would love to hear what prompted that switch\" — gets to insight in 2 minutes.\n\n### 2 hours before: Logistics prep\n\n**☐ Test the recording setup.** Open your recording tool. Record a 30-second test. Play it back. Confirm audio levels, video framing, and that the file saves correctly. Recording failures account for a meaningfully high rate of lost interviews — the cost of a 30-second test is nothing compared to losing the data.\n\n**☐ Test the call link.** Click your own meeting link. Confirm it loads, you are in the right room, and screen-sharing works if you will demo anything.\n\n**☐ Charge devices and check connection.** Laptop on charger, phone on backup hotspot, headphones tested. If you are remote, run a connection test.\n\n**☐ Verify the calendar invite is accurate.** Time zone, link, and any pre-call instructions to the participant. Wrong time zone is the #1 cause of no-shows.\n\n**☐ Prepare the [consent form](/docs/research-consent-form-template).** Have it ready to share. Get explicit consent for recording at the top of the call.\n\n**☐ Set up your note-taking environment.** Whether you use a dedicated note app, a paper notebook, or [AI note-taking](/docs/ai-note-taker-user-interviews), have it open and ready. Do not fumble with software in front of the participant.\n\n### 30 minutes before: Personal prep\n\n**☐ Take a real break.** Nielsen Norman Group interview failure research explicitly calls out exhaustion: never schedule interviews back-to-back without breaks. Aim for at least 15 minutes between sessions.\n\n**☐ Eat and hydrate.** A 60-minute interview requires sustained attention. Low blood sugar shows up as missed follow-ups.\n\n**☐ Re-center on listening.** Do a 60-second exercise: close your eyes, breathe, and remind yourself that your only job in this interview is to understand this person's experience. Not to validate a roadmap, not to defend a feature, not to demo anything.\n\n**☐ Open your hypotheses note.** Last glance before the call. Do not open the discussion guide yet — you do not want to read it during the call.\n\n### 5 minutes before: Final checks\n\n**☐ Close all unnecessary tabs and apps.** Slack, email, calendar notifications. Mute everything that could ping mid-call.\n\n**☐ Open your discussion guide and notes side by side.** One window for the guide, one for notes. Test that you can switch between them without looking down.\n\n**☐ Start recording the moment the participant joins.** Once you have verbal consent. Do not wait — the first 30 seconds often contain the warmup gold that contextualizes everything later.\n\n## What to Bring (Even If You Are Remote)\n\nA practical kit, prepared once and re-used:\n\n- **Discussion guide** — printed or in a separate window\n- **Hypothesis note** — what you currently believe\n- **Participant context one-pager** — name, role, tenure, anomalies\n- **Consent form / verbal consent script**\n- **Note template** — pre-structured so you are not designing it on the fly\n- **Backup contact info** — participant email and phone for tech issues\n- **Time-keeping mechanism** — a visible clock you trust, not just the call window\n\n## The Two-Person Setup (When You Can)\n\nWhenever possible, run interviews with two people: a moderator who asks questions and a notetaker who captures verbatim. The moderator focuses entirely on listening; the notetaker focuses entirely on capturing.\n\nIf you cannot have two humans, [AI note-taking](/docs/ai-note-taker-user-interviews) is the modern alternative. Koji handles the notetaker role automatically — transcribing in real time, tagging structured question responses, and generating a draft summary the moment the interview ends. The moderator gets to stay fully present. Pair this with [active listening techniques](/docs/active-listening-techniques) for the cleanest interview output.\n\n## A Compact Checklist You Can Print\n\nFor teams that prefer a one-page reference, here is the entire checklist condensed:\n\n**Day before**\n- [ ] Re-read research brief\n- [ ] Review discussion guide; mark must-ask vs. optional\n- [ ] Write down 2-3 hypotheses\n- [ ] List your biases\n\n**Same day, 6h before**\n- [ ] Read screener responses\n- [ ] Check account context (tenure, plan, usage)\n- [ ] Note participant anomalies\n- [ ] Draft a personalized opening\n\n**Same day, 2h before**\n- [ ] Test recording (30-second playback)\n- [ ] Test call link\n- [ ] Charge devices, check connection\n- [ ] Verify invite time zone\n- [ ] Prepare consent form\n- [ ] Open note-taking environment\n\n**30 min before**\n- [ ] Take a break (not back-to-back)\n- [ ] Eat and hydrate\n- [ ] Re-center on listening\n- [ ] Open hypotheses note\n\n**5 min before**\n- [ ] Close all unnecessary apps\n- [ ] Open guide and notes side by side\n- [ ] Start recording when participant joins (after consent)\n\n## Common Pre-Interview Mistakes\n\n**Reading the discussion guide for the first time on the call.** You will sound robotic and miss follow-up opportunities. Read it the day before.\n\n**Skipping the participant context review.** Asking a 5-year customer \"how long have you been using us?\" signals you did not prepare. Participants notice.\n\n**Back-to-back scheduling.** Three interviews in a row degrades the third by 30-40%. Block recovery time between sessions.\n\n**Not testing the tech.** \"Can you hear me?\" \"Sorry, my mic is not working\" — these eat into research time you cannot get back.\n\n**Forgetting to record consent.** \"Is it OK if I record this conversation for our internal notes?\" — explicit verbal consent at the start of the recording is the minimum bar. For some jurisdictions ([GDPR](/docs/gdpr-compliant-ai-user-research) in particular), written consent is required.\n\n**Trying to memorize the guide.** Do not. Use it as a reference. Your job is to listen actively, not perform a script. See [how to moderate user interviews](/docs/how-to-moderate-user-interviews) for in-call tactics.\n\n## How Koji Helps\n\nKoji eliminates most of the manual prep work so the moderator can focus on the conversation:\n\n- **Auto-generated discussion guide** — Koji creates the discussion guide from your research brief, so you do not draft it from scratch\n- **Participant context cards** — Koji pulls account context, screener answers, and prior interview history into a one-page brief automatically\n- **AI moderation option** — for studies where you want async or always-on interviews, Koji runs the full interview with an AI moderator using your discussion guide\n- **Real-time transcription and structured tagging** — Koji transcribes the call and tags responses to your [structured questions](/docs/structured-questions-guide) live, so you can focus on listening\n- **Consent and recording built-in** — Koji handles consent collection and recording compliance so you do not manage that infrastructure\n- **Post-interview synthesis in minutes** — Koji generates the draft summary the moment the interview ends, eliminating the synthesis backlog\n\nTeams using AI-assisted research tools report significantly faster time-to-insight, which means more time for the parts of prep that only humans can do — building hypotheses, choosing what to probe, and staying genuinely curious about each participant.\n\n## Related Resources\n\n- [Discussion Guide Template](/docs/discussion-guide-template) — the document you are reviewing in your prep window\n- [Research Brief Template](/docs/research-brief-template) — where the research question lives\n- [Structured Questions Guide](/docs/structured-questions-guide) — the 6 question types that make every interview comparable\n- [Remote Interview Best Practices](/docs/remote-interview-best-practices) — additional tactics for video-call interviews\n- [How to Moderate User Interviews](/docs/how-to-moderate-user-interviews) — the in-call companion to this pre-interview guide\n- [Research Bias Guide](/docs/research-bias-guide) — the biases your prep should help you control for\n- [AI Note Taker for User Interviews](/docs/ai-note-taker-user-interviews) — how AI eliminates the moderator-plus-notetaker setup\n- [Active Listening Techniques](/docs/active-listening-techniques) — what to do once the interview starts\n","category":"Interview Techniques","lastModified":"2026-05-15T03:26:36.505596+00:00","metaTitle":"Pre-Interview Preparation Checklist: 24-Hour Guide for User Interviews","metaDescription":"A complete pre-interview prep checklist covering research, participant context, logistics, and personal readiness. Includes a printable version and how Koji automates most prep work.","keywords":["user interview checklist","interview prep checklist","how to prepare for user interview","pre-interview preparation","before user interview","user research preparation","interview preparation checklist","user interview prep"],"aiSummary":"The complete 24-hour preparation checklist for any user interview, broken into research, participant, logistics, and personal-readiness buckets. Includes a printable one-page version and how Koji automates discussion guide creation, participant context, transcription, and consent.","aiPrerequisites":["You have an upcoming user interview scheduled","Basic familiarity with user research workflows"],"aiLearningOutcomes":["Run a complete 24-hour pre-interview prep workflow","Avoid the most common pre-interview failure modes (tech, fatigue, missing context)","Use AI-assisted tools to automate the mechanical parts of prep","Stay fully present in the interview by offloading note-taking and consent","Build a re-usable prep kit across all your interviews"],"aiDifficulty":"beginner","aiEstimatedTime":"9 minutes"}],"pagination":{"total":1,"returned":1,"offset":0}}