Interview Techniques
38 articles
Master the art of asking great questions, building rapport, probing for insights, and avoiding bias.
The Five Whys Technique: How to Find Root Causes in User Research (with AI)
The Five Whys is a root-cause analysis technique that turns surface-level user feedback into actionable insight. Learn how to apply it in interviews and run it with AI-powered probing at scale.
Laddering Technique: How to Uncover the Deep 'Why' Behind User Decisions
The laddering technique is a qualitative interview method that climbs from product attributes through functional consequences to personal values — revealing the motivational chain behind user decisions. This guide covers means-end chain theory, step-by-step laddering interview structure, and how AI makes laddering scalable.
How Long Should a User Interview Be? A Practical Guide to Interview Length
How long a user interview should last by research type, why most interviews run too long, the science of participant attention, and how async AI interviews remove the length-vs-depth trade-off entirely.
Cognitive Interviews: How to Test Your Survey Questions Before You Launch
A practical guide to cognitive interviewing — the pretesting technique that reveals whether your survey questions and interview guides are understood as intended. Covers think-aloud, verbal probing, sample sizing, and AI-powered approaches.
Why Hypothetical Questions Ruin User Interviews (and What to Ask Instead)
Hypothetical questions like "Would you use this?" produce unreliable answers. Learn why future-tense and speculative questions mislead, how to rewrite them as past-behavior questions, and how AI interviews keep every conversation grounded in real evidence.
Probing Questions for User Interviews: 40+ Examples to Get Deeper Answers
A practical guide to probing questions in user interviews — the six types of probes, 40+ ready-to-use examples, common mistakes, and how Koji's AI interviewer probes every answer automatically and consistently.
AI Interview Best Practices: 14 Rules for Running High-Quality AI-Moderated Customer Research
A practical playbook for running AI-moderated customer interviews that produce research-grade insights — 14 concrete rules covering brief design, question writing, probing depth, mode selection, recruiting, and analysis.
How to Talk to Users: The Modern Customer Interview Playbook for Founders (2026)
The complete founder's guide to talking to users — Eric Migicovsky's 5 YC questions, the rules (no pitching, no hypotheticals, ask about the past), how many interviews to run, and how Koji scales founder customer conversations from 5 a week to 50.
Confirmation Bias in User Research: How to Recognize and Eliminate It
Confirmation bias quietly corrupts user research by leading teams to hear what they already believe. Learn how it shows up in interviews and analysis, and the practical tactics — and AI moderation — that neutralize it.
Cognitive Biases in User Interviews: A Complete Guide for Researchers
The 14 cognitive biases that distort user interview findings — and the practical techniques (plus AI moderation) that neutralize each one.
Discussion Guide Template: How to Structure Your Research Sessions
Learn how to create a research discussion guide that keeps interviews focused and uncovers deep insights. Includes templates, question structures, and how AI platforms like Koji replace static guides with adaptive conversation.
The Mom Test: How to Ask Customer Interview Questions That Get Honest Answers
A complete guide to the Mom Test methodology by Rob Fitzpatrick—covering the three core rules, good vs. bad interview questions, avoiding confirmation bias, and how AI scales honest customer discovery conversations.
Pre-Interview Preparation: The 24-Hour Checklist Before Every User Interview
A complete 24-hour pre-interview preparation checklist covering research, participant context, logistics, and personal readiness — plus how AI-native research platforms automate most of the manual prep work.
Remote Usability Testing: The Complete Guide for 2026
A practical, research-backed guide to remote usability testing — moderated vs. unmoderated, sample size, writing tasks, the metrics that matter, and how to run sessions at scale with an AI moderator.
How to Record Customer Interviews (Consent, Tools & Transcription)
A complete guide to recording customer interviews the right way: getting consent, choosing tools, capturing clean audio, transcribing accurately, and skipping recording entirely with AI-moderated interviews.
How to Run Your First Customer Interview: A Step-by-Step Guide for First-Timers (2026)
Everything you need to run a great first customer interview — recruitment script, opening lines, the 10 questions to ask (and 5 to avoid), how to take notes, and what to do after. Built for founders, PMs, and designers running their first study.
Active Listening Techniques for Research Interviews
Learn how to practice active listening during qualitative interviews to uncover deeper participant insights through reflection, paraphrasing, and strategic silence.
Probing and Follow-Up Questions: Going Deeper in Research Interviews
Learn the different types of probing questions — clarification, elaboration, and contrast — and when to use each to get richer qualitative data from your participants.
Avoiding Bias in Research Interviews
Understand the most common biases in qualitative research — confirmation bias, leading questions, and social desirability — and learn proven techniques to minimize their impact on your data.
Remote Interview Best Practices for Qualitative Research
Everything you need to run high-quality remote research interviews — from technical setup and rapport building to maintaining participant engagement over video, phone, or asynchronous channels.
User Interview Guide Template: How to Plan, Run, and Analyze Interviews
A practical template for creating user interview guides that produce consistent, actionable insights — whether you run 5 interviews or 500.
Empathy Interviews: Questions, Structure, and How to Run Them
An empathy interview goes deeper than a typical user interview — it surfaces the feelings, values, and mental models behind behavior. This guide explains how to structure and run empathy interviews that reveal what customers really experience.
In-Depth Interviews: The Complete Methodology Guide
Everything you need to plan, conduct, and analyze in-depth interviews — the gold standard of qualitative research.
How to Moderate User Interviews: Skills, Probes, and the Question Flow That Surfaces Real Insights
A practical guide to moderating user interviews — rapport building, listening ratios, probing techniques, and how AI-moderated interviews remove the human variability that limits research quality.
Expert Interviews: How to Plan, Recruit, and Run Them
Expert interviews tap subject-matter experts to compress months of learning into a few conversations. Here is how to recruit experts, structure the interview, ask sharp questions, and analyze findings at scale.
How to Handle Difficult Participants in User Interviews (2026 Playbook)
A practical guide to the eight most common difficult participant types in user research — over-talkers, vague answerers, performative responders, no-shows, and more — with the language, probes, and AI techniques that get useful answers without making anyone uncomfortable.
How to Interview Enterprise Customers and C-Suite Decision Makers
A practical playbook for running customer research interviews with enterprise buyers and C-suite decision makers. Covers recruiting strategy, ROI framing, time-respect, multi-stakeholder triangulation, and how to use Koji's AI interviewer to land 30-minute exec conversations without burning your champion.
Structured vs. Unstructured Interviews: Differences, Examples, and When to Use Each
Structured interviews ask every participant the same questions in the same order for comparable, reliable data; unstructured interviews flow like a conversation for depth and discovery. Learn the differences, see examples, and find out why semi-structured AI interviews give you both.
Discussion Guide for User Interviews: Template, Structure, and 30+ Example Questions (2026)
A discussion guide is the structured outline of topics, questions, and probes that keeps a user interview on track without making it feel like a script. Learn the four-section structure, time allocation, 30+ example questions you can copy, and how AI moderation turns a discussion guide into a live conversational study.
Moderated Usability Testing: How to Run Sessions That Surface Real Problems (2026 Guide)
A practical 2026 guide to moderated usability testing: how to write tasks, run think-aloud sessions, measure task success and SEQ, choose sample size, and scale moderation with AI on Koji.
How Long Should User Interviews Be? Length and Duration Best Practices
How long user interviews should run by research type, with target durations for discovery, evaluative, and pulse research. Includes the science of fatigue, how AI moderation changes the math, and a calculator for picking your target length.
How to Write User Interview Questions That Surface Real Insights
A practical guide to writing user interview questions that uncover genuine insights — covering open vs closed questions, common mistakes (leading, double-barreled, hypothetical), and how Koji's 6 structured question types combine qualitative and quantitative research.
Customer Journey Interviews: Mapping the Full Customer Experience Through Conversation
Learn how to run customer journey interviews that reveal the emotional arc, decision points, and invisible friction across the complete customer experience.
Stakeholder Interviews: How to Align Your Team Before Research Begins
A complete guide to conducting stakeholder interviews before user research — how to identify the right people, craft powerful questions, synthesize input, and build organizational alignment around your research plan.
Building Rapport in Research Interviews: How to Make Participants Open Up
Learn proven techniques to build trust and comfort with research participants so they share honest, detailed insights instead of surface-level answers.
Open-Ended Interview Questions: 100+ Examples and How to Use Them
A comprehensive library of open-ended interview questions for product discovery, UX research, customer feedback, employee experience, and more — plus how to write your own.
Note-Taking in User Research: How to Capture Insights Without Missing the Interview
A complete guide to note-taking methods for UX researchers — from verbatim transcription to structured templates — and how AI-moderated interviews like Koji eliminate the cognitive tradeoff between listening and writing entirely.
Critical Incident Technique: The Interview Method That Captures What Really Matters
Learn how to use the Critical Incident Technique (CIT) to uncover the specific moments that shape user experience. Developed by Flanagan (1954), CIT interviews collect real incidents — not generalizations — to reveal actionable patterns in user behaviour.