Preparing Your Discussion Guide for Upload

If you already have a discussion guide, you can upload it into an AI Interview instead of having Decode generate one. The AI conducts the interview from what your guide contains, so the detail you put into it determines how the session runs. This article covers what to include.

Supported formats are PDF, DOCX and TXT, up to 200 MB.

STATE THE RESEARCH OBJECTIVES

Open the guide with what the study is trying to learn. Write the questions you need answered rather than the study title.

The AI reads the rest of the guide against these objectives, so they shape which parts of a participant's answer it treats as important and follows up on.

EXPLAIN EACH TOPIC BEFORE THE QUESTIONS

For every topic in the guide, describe what you want to understand and why it matters, then give the questions you would ask.

The description is what tells the AI what it is listening for. A topic described as exploring where uncertainty enters the purchase process produces a different interview from the same questions with no explanation attached, because the AI knows what a useful answer looks like and can probe towards it.

Keep one topic per section of the guide. Where a section covers two subjects, the AI splits its attention across both and covers neither properly.

SET THE DEPTH FOR EACH TOPIC

State how deeply each topic should be explored: shallow, moderate or deep.

Shallow for warm up, context, and anything where a short answer is enough. Moderate for topics that need substance but are not the point of the study. Deep for the topics your research question actually rests on, where you want the AI to keep probing until the topic is properly explored.

Depth is how you direct the interview. Marking everything deep does not produce a deeper interview, because the session has a fixed length. It produces one where the early topics are thorough and the later ones are rushed.

WRITE THE PROBES YOU WANT USED

Under each question, list the follow-ups you would ask if you were moderating. The angles you want covered but would not open with.

Probes are how you get depth without adding topics. They stay attached to the question they sit under, so a question with three probes gives the AI a much clearer sense of what to chase than the same question on its own.

Include the probes you would use to test your assumptions, including the ones you would rather were wrong.

SET THE TIME EACH TOPIC SHOULD TAKE

Give each topic an estimated duration and state the total length of the interview.

The AI paces the session against the duration you set in Details, so the timings in your guide tell it how to distribute that time across topics rather than spreading it evenly.

Add the timings up before you upload. If the total runs over the session length, cut topics rather than shortening all of them, since a guide that is too long gets compressed at the end where the reflective questions usually sit.

ORDER THE GUIDE THE WAY THE CONVERSATION SHOULD RUN

The AI works through the topics in the order they appear.

Start with warm up and context to settle the participant, move into the substance while attention is highest, and close with reflection and an open question asking what has not been covered.

AFTER YOU UPLOAD

Decode extracts research goals from the guide and shows them in Review your research goals.

Read them before publishing to check that every topic is represented and that the depth on each one matches what matters. You can edit any goal, change its depth, delete it, add new ones, or drag to reorder. See Setting up an AI interview.