Qualitative UX Research Course
User Interviews for Strategic Insight
Zero Risk Enrollment: Receive a full refund through the end of the first class day.
Course features
You already run good user interviews. You've built rapport with strangers, recovered from technical disasters mid-session, and pulled helpful insights out of hours of transcripts.
This course is about a specific upgrade: designing and conducting interviews that directly drive strategic decisions.
What's the difference? For one thing, strategic decisions require insights that tell stakeholders something new and non-obvious. These come from rich, detailed conversations.
To get there, your moderation guides need to move from being lists of topics to being instruments for testing the assumptions a decision actually rests on. Your interviews push past what users’ surface beliefs and opinions into the mental models underneath, where strategic insight actually lives.
Across three sessions, you will develop and refine a moderator's guide using a shared product scenario. The course is hands-on throughout, combining structured critique, probing practice, live interview simulations in groups of three, and a real pilot interview between sessions.
The course deliverable is a moderator's guide template that will make sure your future interviews are tightly connected to the strategic decisions they inform.
As they advance in their careers, UX researchers are increasingly asked to inform decisions that go beyond design optimization. Whether to build, who to build for, what bet to place next quarter: these are the questions stakeholders bring to research now, and user interviews are still the most flexible tool for answering them.
The interview techniques that work for usability and concept feedback don't automatically scale up to strategic questions. Three things have to shift:
- The design has to tighten: every question needs to trace back to an assumption the team is actually weighing, not just a topic the team is curious about.
- The moderation has to be more skillful: it's no longer just about writing good questions; it's about guiding the whole conversation in a way that avoids bias and creates conditions for participants to give rich, detailed answers.
- They have to go deeper: strategic insight rarely lives at the level of users' opinions and reactions. It lives in their mental models, in the structures of belief and reasoning underneath the surface.
When you complete all three of these shifts, interviews become reliable and precise enough to settle product questions. Stakeholders bring you the decision they're stuck on. You bring back evidence about the assumption that's actually load-bearing. The conversation in the room shifts from "what did users say?" to "what should we do?", and you're the one with the answer.
This course is structured to reflect how user interviews actually get sharper: through doing, getting feedback, and revising in real time.
You will work with a shared product scenario, Atlas (a fictional travel concierge app), that gives every cohort the same context to design interviews around. This shared grounding lets the cohort compare guides, pressure-test questions across different framings, and learn from how other researchers approached the same product decisions.
Week 1: Build the interview (hands-on design)
Week 2: Practice and improve (hands-on moderation)
Week 3: Diagnose and strengthen (applied insight work)
Each session combines short instruction, hands-on workshops, peer critique rounds, and live moderation practice. Between Weeks 2 and 3, you will conduct a real pilot interview using your refined guide.
By the end, you will have a refined moderator's guide template built upon a practical framework for connecting interview work to the decisions your stakeholders are weighing.
- Translate product decisions and the assumptions behind them into testable interview constructs
- Draft interview guides that target trust, perceived value, barriers, and decision-making, rather than topical Q&A
- Anticipate threats to validity including leading questions, hypothetical bias, and ambiguity before they reach a participant
- Probe to surface mental models, tradeoffs, and decision drivers under live conditions
- Adjust direction in real time without sacrificing neutrality or rigor
- Recognize signals (hesitation, contradiction, drift) and follow them productively
- Critique your own and others' interview questions using structured appraisal techniques
- Diagnose what worked and what didn't in a real interview and revise your guide accordingly
- Translate interview findings into decision-relevant insight your team can act on
You'll be able to design and conduct user interviews that connect directly to the decisions your team is weighing, not just produce findings about what users said. That shift, from reporting back to making decisions easier to make, is what separates strategic researchers from procedural ones in the eyes of senior stakeholders.
You'll leave with hands-on experience designing a guide, pressure-testing it with peers, and conducting a real pilot interview. That's work you can speak to concretely in interviews and on a portfolio. Interview skill is notoriously hard to evidence; this course gives you something specific to point to.
You'll be able to communicate interview findings as decision-relevant insight rather than verbatim summaries, and to defend the design choices behind your guide when a PM or designer pushes back. That kind of clarity changes how your work is treated, and how often you're invited into earlier-stage product conversations.
- An early- to mid-career researcher who has run interviews and wants to move beyond following a script
- A researcher whose interview findings tend to produce summaries when they should produce arguments
- A practitioner whose stakeholders are asking for sharper recommendations and better-defended interpretations
Angela Orlando, PhD
Bio
Dr. Angela Orlando is a cultural anthropologist and senior user experience researcher specializing in ethnographic methods and in-depth interviewing. She brings more than 15 years of industry experience conducting high-stakes qualitative research for leading technology organizations, including recent work with Google and ServiceNow.
Angela began her career as a journalist and spent years as a professor of anthropology, where she trained students in qualitative research design, field methods, and analytical writing. She is known for translating rigorous research practice into clear, teachable frameworks and for coaching researchers to develop confident, real-world interviewing skills.
In this course, Angela draws on her experience running hundreds of in-depth interviews across industries and cultures to help researchers move from “good questions” to truly strategic, decision-shaping conversations.
By course completion, you will confidently:
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Design interview guides that target product assumptions and decision needs, with constructs like trust, value, and risk (rather than topics) as the unit of question design.
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Moderate live interviews with rigor and adaptability, probing for mental models and decision drivers while staying neutral and following meaningful signals.
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Evaluate interview quality using structured critique techniques, identifying threats to validity such as leading questions, hypothetical bias, and ambiguity before they affect data.
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Synthesize early themes and insight patterns from live sessions while the details are still fresh
