Where guides live

Inside any project, the Interview Guides tab lists every guide you’ve created. Each card shows a status badge — Draft, Approved, or Archived — plus interview type, audience type, and version. Only approved guides can drive auto-interviews.

Creating a new guide

Click Create new interview guide to open a three-step wizard.

Step 1: Choose an interview type

Four options, each shaping how the guide gets generated and how synthesis later interprets the data:

Problem discovery — exploring unknown problems in a market. Open-ended sections, no hypotheses to validate.
Problem validation — testing specific problem hypotheses. The guide will include a card-sort section if you give it five or more hypotheses (more on that below).
Concept testing — evaluating a specific product concept. Sections probe what’s working, what’s confusing, and who the concept is for.
Price testing — exploring value perception, willingness-to-pay anchors, and price sensitivity.

Step 2: Write learning goals

Each learning goal is one specific thing you want to understand from this set of interviews. Click Add learning goal and type the goal as a short, concrete sentence. The order you list them in becomes the priority. Three to seven goals is a reasonable range; more than that and the guide gets thin coverage on each.

For problem validation, you’ll also enter explicit problem hypotheses. These are statements that should be either confirmed or contested by the interview evidence.

Step 3: Generate

Click Generate guide. Candor takes a few minutes to draft a complete guide: sections with intent, question variants, interviewer notes, re-anchor variants for personas you’ve already interviewed, and stopping criteria per section. You’ll be redirected to the guide detail page when it’s ready.

Reviewing a draft

The guide detail page lays out what you got. Read through it before approving:

Learning goals — numbered list with the priority chip you set.
Sections — each section has a title, a purpose statement, interviewer notes (instructions to the auto-interviewer), and one or more questions with intent. Section types include Core (always run), Standard (usually run), and Conditional (run only when triggered, e.g. top-ranked hypotheses in problem validation).
Front-end re-anchors — two question variants the interviewer uses to open: one for fresh personas, one for personas you’ve interviewed before. The latter references prior sessions to maintain continuity.

Card-sort mode (problem validation only)

When you have five or more problem hypotheses, the generator switches to a card-sort methodology. Personas sort the hypotheses into four pain buckets (very challenging, somewhat challenging, not challenging, not applicable), then the interviewer probes the top-ranked ones in depth. The guide detail page surfaces a banner explaining when card-sort is active.

Vocabulary warnings

Draft guides may show an amber warning banner listing any phrases that are too jargon-heavy, too vague, or likely to confuse a persona. Each flag includes the offending statement and a suggested rewrite. Edit the inputs, regenerate, and the warning clears.

Approving a guide

Once a draft looks right, approve it. Approved guides are immutable — they get assigned a version number, and any future edits create a new version (the old one stays available for reference). Drafts can be deleted; approved guides can be archived but not deleted.

Building an interview guide