Why an Interview Snapshot Streamlines UX Research Analysis (w/ Free Template)

Published:

November 21, 2024

Last Updated:

November 21, 2024

User interviews (not us, the other kind) are a mainstay in most any UX’er’s toolkit. They offer depth of insights, flexibility in method, and—with some training—accessible for researchers and non-researchers alike.

But then comes the important, and sometimes overwhelming, part: analysis. If you’ve ever felt this analysis paralysis, then an interview snapshot could be the solution you’re looking for.

An interview snapshot is a way to organize your thinking as research sessions are happening, setting you up for smoother, less stressful analysis later on. There’s no wrong way to use it, and we have a customizable template to get you going.

Read on to learn:

The definition of an interview snapshot
How to use one for your next participant interview
Why they’re helpful for research workflows

📸 Download the free interview snapshot template.

What is an interview snapshot?

An interview snapshot is a way to distill learning, insights, questions, or to-dos from your participant sessions. Combined with your note taking process, it’s a way to organize your thinking and can help make analysis and shareout of recommendations faster and easier.

According to leadership and career coach Roberta Dombrowski, who developed the interview snapshot template:

I adapted the format from Teresa Torres' Continuous Discovery Habits. I included a journey map format in the template because much of our work at User interviews is related to the research process/journey that customers went through.

The goal for our research program at the time was to easily train up PMs/PDs on how to conduct research across the team. They were gathering a ton of insights during interviews and I wanted a way for them to be able to pull out key insights without necessarily needing to do an in depth thematic analysis of their results.

The snapshot—as the name implies—is meant to be scrappy and quick. Think stickies to remind yourself of something to return to, but in a digital form. The snapshot is a way for your to get out any initial reactions, thoughts, or gut feelings before they leave your mind.

👥 Recruit qualified participants fast for your next interview.

What UXR challenges can an interview snapshot help alleviate?

During the course of a live research interview process, there’s a lot of moving parts to manage:

Balancing the questions you must ask with unexpected—and interesting—responses
Ensuring you are listening more than speaking and not leading with your questions
Paying attention to biases, both implicit and explicit, that might skew your results

Once an interview is complete, it’s easy to move on to the next thing, which might be another interview. An interview snapshot helps create a moment of reflection for you to “sit with” the participant’s responses, noting anything of interest, worth sharing, and so on.

In this way, you’re taking advantage of the freshness of the interview and helping your future self when it comes time for analysis, insight generation, and recommendations. The snapshot can reduce recall bias, memory lags, or just plain old gaps in interview context.

How to use an interview snapshot

The interview snapshot is best utilized before holding your first session. For most UX’ers, that means setting it up after kicking off your initial recruitment process, whether that’s externally with a screener or internally with an opt-in form. More specifically, it makes sense to set it up as you’re scheduling sessions with participants. That way, you can begin customizing the elements you’ll need to make sense of the interview when it’s finished.

For example, are you going to show a concept or prototype? You might include a section on it. Are you organizing interviews by persona or product usage? Make sure there’s a category. All of these pre-session customizations help make the snapshot template a better fit for your needs.

Importantly, this is only a snapshot, and as such, this should support your preferred note taking method, not replace it. The snapshot should be, well, a glimpse of what happened, not the nitty gritty details. Focus on pulling 2-3 key takeaways, supporting quote timestamps, and anything else that you want to make sure you return to during analysis.

Roberta urges customization with its use:

I'd encourage people to adapt it as needed for their teams and interview formats. There may be additional sections you want to add based on the questions that you’re asking.

Here is how the interview snapshot fits into a typical research workflow:

Qualified participants are scheduled
Customize interview snapshot for session type
Hold session, taking notes as normal
Immediately after session, complete interview snapshot
[repeat for remaining interview sessions]

🎨 Download this template from our free library.

Why use an interview snapshot

Although interviews are a go-to method in user research, they can be difficult to organize and synthesize—the richness of data requires more care in unpacking and analyzing. AI is helping many UX’ers accomplish this more easily, but many report the necessity of using context to guide and clarify models. This template can help with that process.

If you aren’t using AI to help analyze interviews, it’s a way to organize your own approach to analysis, giving you rolling insights to carry into subsequent sessions (did a participant mention something you want to revisit in another session?) and an overview of all sessions to help jump-start your summarization efforts.

One other additional benefit is visibility with stakeholders and partners, who might not be able to join sessions, but who would benefit from snackable insights gleaned in the snapshot. Very often, stakeholders need direction and recommendation faster than researchers can provide it—this snapshot offers them a peek into your thinking ahead of the final deliverable. (Of course, it’s vital to make clear these are raw notes, not yet reviewed, revised, and shaped into actionable insights.)