Discussion guide - the whys and the hows

When starting off as a UX researcher, I was thrown into the cold water. In between two sessions, my back then-manager looked at me and said: “Can you do the next interview? I need to take a little break.”

I panicked. Of course, I wanted to take the next session and of course, I wanted to do my first interview. But how the hell am I supposed to know what to say?

She handed me her discussion guide and briefly explained what we are going to talk about. I observed 3 sessions already so I kind of knew already what was going to happen. But as soon as the interview started, I blanked. Thankfully, I glimpsed at the paper my manager had given me and had a starting point.

The interview was not my best: I was incredibly nervous, stuck super close to the script, and did not dare to have a proper conversation. But I managed.

My lifesaver was the discussion guide, carefully prepared by my manager.

Today, after thousands of interviews and studies, still I never go without a guide. In the following, I will outline why a discussion guide is useful and give 7 valuable tips on how to create and use a discussion guide.

In the end, you can find templates to copy and use.

What is a discussion guide?

A discussion guide is a script that outlines the structure of an interview or other lab study. It holds all relevant questions we want to ask our participants as well as any instructions for the researcher.

Why should I write a discussion guide?

The advantages of discussion guides are plenty. Let me outline a couple of them:

It’s a great planning tool

Writing the discussion guide helps me always to plan out my research. It gives me an overview of what kind of questions I want to ask, which topics are the most important, and what I want to allocate most of the time on.

It makes sure that everyone is on the same page

Especially when you have external stakeholders, you can use the discussion guide as a communication tool to make sure that you have all the important topics covered. I love to share my discussion guide with the product managers or whoever requested the research and go through it step by step. It gives them a feeling of involvement. Furthermore, you can ensure that you are on the right track and allow the stakeholders to address their concerns or open questions early on and not in the middle of the first or second interview.

Structure for both, myself and the other

Have you ever been in a crisscross conversation where the topics just did not line up at all? It is almost impossible to dive deep into one too much and can be at times very confusing.

When structuring the discussion guide, I always make sure that the sections are ordered and make sense. This will help me later in the interview to not jump between topics too much and provide some guidance for the interviewee.

The lifeline during an interview

While the story from early is already years ago, I still sometimes have to stop during an interview and reflect on what I actually want to talk about next. While I do not stick to the discussion guide one by one anymore, the segments give me a quick overview on what the next topic is I want to learn about. It takes cognitive load during the interview and allows me to focus completely on my counterpart. I do not have to think about what question to ask next, but rather listen to the person I am interviewing.

Also, I can make sure that I do not forget something crucial.

Having someone else jump in

Ever got sick right before an interview? Or maybe had a younger colleague that wanted to learn by doing interviews? Or needed a break? Or ran late for an interview? Whatever the reason, there might be occasions when you potentially won’t run the session yourself.

Interview times are very valuable and pricey. Rescheduling them might take additional resources and costs. A discussion guide can serve as instructions for anyone else to run the session and still make sure that the most important topics are covered.

7 tips on how to write and use a discussion guide

1. Easy and logical structure

As mentioned above, the most important factor about a discussion guide is the structure. Splitting up your questions into sections will give the interview a logical order that makes sense to you and your interview partner.

Make sure that the structure is visibly notable. Write the headlines or topics in bold or as a header or maybe even use different colors if this works best for you. At times, I use PowerPoint or google slides to create my discussion guides, having one topic on each slide. This also allows me to control how many questions I allocate to one topic

2. From broad to specific

Start with broad, generic questions. Then work your way to more detailed topics. By using that approach you can make sure that at first, you get an overview of all of the things that are important and then zoom into the details of each of those.

3. Objectives as sub-section

The time in an interview is valuable. And limited. Therefore, you should make sure that all of the questions you are asking actually make sense. Write down objectives as subsections within each topic you want to dive into. Then you can go ahead and think about the questions that would make sense to ask at this point.

4. Write down the timeframe

For each topic, you should work your way back towards how much time you want to allocate to that. For example, the introduction should not be longer than 5 minutes. Broader topics should be covered within maximum 20% of the time whereas you should dedicate the most time on the most important topic (sounds logical no?). By writing down the timeframe next to the section, you can in the interview make sure that you are still on track. I usually have a table of content with all the different sections and write down how much time each gets. In the actual discussion guide, I add up the times so that I can check my progress easily during the interview.

5. Provide instructions

Do you have a prototype or other media you want to share? Do you want the participant to complete a specific task? Whatever it is, write it into the discussion guide. Make this so idiot-proof that anyone that never did an interview before could execute each step.

6. Open-ended questions

As a researcher, you know already that the questions you ask in an interview should be open-ended. Using open-ended questions requires the respondents to describe the topic in their own words. You avoid giving the answer away or getting desirable or undesirable replies. Closed questions, that can be answered with yes or no, can be used to introduce the next topic or maybe in the end of a section when you want to know something really specific.

7. Freestyle once in a while

A discussion guide is a collection of relevant topics that need to be covered in a research session to answer the research question.

It serves as a guideline. The questions listed in this discussion guide are not a questionnaire or survey. Not all questions need to be asked, asked in that specific way or in the order they are listed. While it is a great tool, the more comfortable you get with doing research the more you will deviate from the guide. It is okay to maybe dig a little deeper at some ends and just brush over topics at the other end.

Here is how a page in my discussion guide looks like:

If you want to have a template on how I create discussion guides in text files or slides, you can download them here:

Template Discussion guide in Slides.pdf

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Template discussion guide in Text.pdf

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