These user interview prompts are made for product managers, designers, and founders: fill in the product, the target users, and the one thing you most want to verify, and AI will draft an interview guide you can take straight into scheduling. Every question is open-ended, with no leading phrasing, and each one comes with a follow-up. Copy this prompt before your interviews and you can start in ten minutes, instead of staring at a blank document wondering what to ask first.
Copy this prompt and replace the bracketed parts
You are a user researcher with 5 years of experience. Help me prepare a user interview.
Product: [Product name and a one-sentence description, e.g. an expense-tracking app for freelancers that categorizes spending automatically]
Target users: [User profile, e.g. freelancers aged 25–35 who have tracked expenses on their phone for over six months]
Goal: [The one thing this interview should clarify, e.g. why users stop tracking after two weeks]
Length and format: [30 minutes, video call / in person]
Draft the interview guide following these requirements:
1. Opening, 2–3 sentences: explain the purpose, length, and confidentiality so interviewees can relax.
2. Background questions, 3: ask about their current situation and habits; don't ask about the product yet.
3. Core questions, 6–8: focus on the verification goal, all open-ended. Never use leading phrasing such as “Don't you think…” or “Do you like…” ; add 1 follow-up to each question.
4. Closing questions, 2: ask what else they would like to add and whether they would join a follow-up session.
5. End with a checklist: flag any questions that are still leading or rest on an assumption, and suggest fixes.
Format: split into sections — Opening, Background, Core, Closing, Checklist. Put each question on its own line, in spoken language that can be read aloud as-is.Change these three variables and the guide will hit the mark
Describe target users by behavior, not labels. “A parent who drives to work 5 days a week” is more useful than “office worker”: it tells the AI whether to ask about school runs or time spent waiting in the car. Keep one verification goal per guide; mix two goals and each gets asked about halfway, neither in depth. If the AI's questions are still too vague, add a constraint: “Rewrite 'How do you usually track expenses?' as a scenario question, e.g. 'When was the last time you tracked an expense, and what happened then?'” If the follow-ups are too shallow, add: “For each core question, add one more layer: ask the interviewee for a recent concrete example.”
A guide is not a questionnaire — run these two checks first
First, don't blast this guide out as a survey. Interviews ask “why”; surveys count “how many”. The guide's questions have no answer options, so sending them out would bring back long answers that can't be tallied. Second, the AI has never met your real users, so read the guide yourself first and delete any assumption that doesn't match your product — a feature that doesn't exist, a path users never take. For sensitive topics such as income or health, prepare a “you can skip this” line in advance. During the interview, don't read the script word for word: when an interviewee reaches a real pain point, following them matters more than finishing the guide. Get consent before recording. When the interviews are done, use the method in User Feedback Prompts to sort the raw notes first, then prioritize them.
