BoardSnap is an iOS app that reads whiteboard photos and produces clean summaries and action items in about ten seconds. This user interview script template structures an interview guide — opening, core questions, probe prompts, and wrap-up — on a whiteboard that the whole team aligns on before talking to a single user.
Use this before any user interview study — for discovery (understanding behavior and motivation), validation (testing an idea), or evaluation (understanding a shipped feature's reception). The whiteboard session produces an interview guide that everyone on the team could run — not a script only one person understands.
Budget 45 minutes to write the script. Pilot it with a colleague before the first real interview.
Three to four low-stakes opening questions that help the participant get comfortable and give the interviewer context about who they're talking to. 'Tell me about your role and what you work on day-to-day.' 'How long have you been using [product/tool]?' These are not about the research topic — they're trust-builders.
Write two to four topic areas, each with two to three open-ended questions. Questions start broad and funnel narrower. 'Tell me about the last time you captured a whiteboard session' before 'What happened after you captured it?' Broad before narrow. Behavioral before attitudinal. Past behavior before hypotheticals.
A sidebar list of probes to use throughout: 'Can you tell me more about that?' / 'What did you do next?' / 'Why was that important to you?' / 'Can you show me?' These are the interviewer's tools for going deeper without leading. Write five to seven and keep them visible during the interview.
A separate column: the two or three themes that must be addressed in the interview regardless of how the conversation flows. These are the research questions translated into topic coverage. If the interview ends without touching these topics, the data won't answer the research question.
Two to three closing questions: 'Is there anything I should have asked but didn't?' / 'What's the most important thing you'd want the people who built this to know?' Then logistics: thank the participant, explain next steps, and ask if they're willing to be contacted for follow-up.
The interview script exists to answer the research question. Write the research question at the top of the board. Every interview question should trace back to it. Questions that don't serve the research question don't belong in the script.
Every question on the board should begin with: 'Tell me...', 'Describe...', 'Walk me through...', 'What happened when...', or 'How did you...' Close-ended questions (yes/no answers) generate data you can't probe. Open-ended questions generate stories you can probe.
Start with context-setting questions. Move to behavior questions. End with opinion/attitude questions. Never start with opinions — you haven't earned the participant's candid perspective yet. Their behavior is more reliable than their opinion anyway.
Tape or draw the probe prompts in a column to the right of the interview questions. During interviews, interviewers often forget to probe — having the prompts visible prevents the most common interview mistake: accepting a one-sentence answer and moving on.
Separate from the scripted questions: the two or three topics that must be addressed in every interview regardless of conversational direction. These are the baseline that makes multiple interviews comparable.
BoardSnap reads the warm-up questions, core questions, probe prompts, must-cover topics, and wrap-up. The output is a structured interview guide ready to be shared with every interviewer running the study.
Interview guides written in a doc tend to have too many questions — because writing is easier than editing. A whiteboard forces you to choose: there's finite space for core questions, and the physical constraint produces a leaner, better script.
BoardSnap converts the lean script into a shareable guide before the whiteboard gets erased. Every interviewer on the team gets the same guide, produced from the same debate that produced it on the board.
Eight to twelve substantive questions for a 45-minute interview. More than twelve and you'll rush through them, sacrificing depth for coverage. The goal is three to four rich conversations per topic area — not a survey that happens to be spoken out loud.
As a guide. Participants are not reading from a teleprompter — they're having a conversation. The script ensures coverage; the interviewer's judgment ensures depth. If a participant takes the conversation in a more valuable direction than the script, follow the participant.
A user interview is one-on-one: one researcher, one participant. A focus group is a group discussion. User interviews produce richer individual narratives and prevent the social dynamics that bias focus group responses. Most product research questions are better served by user interviews than focus groups.
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