Interview Notes Separation Template
Keep participant statements, observed behavior, researcher interpretations and follow-up questions distinct in a usable private research record.
When to use this template
Use this when several people review interview notes and conclusions are being mistaken for direct customer statements.
Choose another approach when: You want to publish raw personal notes, call a paraphrase an exact quote, or infer emotions and motives as facts.
Gather these inputs
- Permission-appropriate notes from a relevant conversation.
- A pseudonymous research reference and the task context.
- A reviewer who can check interpretation against the original record.
Copy and adapt the template
Edit the text below and copy it into your own document. Edits stay in this browser field and are not submitted or saved by this page.
Worked example
Illustrative example, not a Crany customer result. Replace every example detail with facts you can verify.
A fictional note says a participant returned to an old email while describing a handoff. That is a reported event, not directly observed behavior. The researcher’s interpretation is that instructions may be hard to retrieve, but another explanation is that the email contained a unique access link. The record separates these possibilities and labels a summarized statement as a paraphrase. A later marketing writer cannot turn it into an exact testimonial saying the product solved a problem the participant never tested.
How to use it
- Label the evidence type at capture rather than after a conclusion is written.
- Separate interpretations and plausible alternatives from the participant’s account.
- Review relevant notes before using a finding or requesting publication permission.
Check before using it
- Paraphrases are not placed in quotation marks as exact testimony.
- Research participation does not imply testimonial publication consent.
- Missing context remains visible to downstream readers.
What to measure
Monitor corrections made during review and whether decisions remain traceable to evidence. A tidy record reduces ambiguity but cannot remove recall bias or substitute for additional observation.
Research and sources
The sources support learning context from specific accounts. This note taxonomy is an original evidence-handling aid, not a validated coding system or a reproduction of a source template.
- Yale: User Interview Example Questions — checked 2026-10-23. Interview structure, current tasks, past experience, alternative workflows and discovery paths.
- Teresa Torres: Customer Interviews — checked 2026-10-23. Story-based interviews about goals, needs and context; separate discovery from selling.
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