A discussion guide is a great way to keep track of your questions and topics of discussion during a user interview. It can also help you to assign notes to questions after your call and to analyze your data across a project.
Benefits of Using a Discussion Guide
Discussion guides are useful to have in Looppanel to:
Take live notes. A discussion guide can help you to take live notes during your user interviews. This will help you to stay focused and to make sure that you don't miss anything important.
Assign notes after your calls by question. After your user interviews, you can use your discussion guide to assign your notes to specific questions. This will make it easy to analyze your data and identify patterns.
Analyze data across a project. You can use your discussion guide to analyze your data across your entire project. This will help you to identify trends and to get a better understanding of your users.
In this support article, we'll walk you through the steps on how you can add a discussion guide to your project on Looppanel.
Step 1: Create a project
Go to the Projects page and click the Create New Project button.
From here, type in your project name. You can also select an icon from the emoji dropdown menu to represent your project.
When youâre ready, hit Create Project.
Step 2: Click âAdd Interview Questionsâ
Click on the Add Interview Questions button.
This will open the Questions dialog box.
Step 3: Type or paste in your discussion guide
You can type your discussion guide into the dialog box, or you can paste it from a word document.
Step 4: Format your guide
Looppanelâs AI is going to read through each question in your discussion guide one by one, and go looking for the answer in your transcript.
To help it work optimally, follow these best practices:
Add your discussion guide in all at once (not one question at a time). Every time you upload a call, Looppanel will use the latest version of your discussion guide to organize your notes. If you change or add the questions after uploading your calls, your notes will not be re-organized.
The quality of guide assignment is dependent on how descriptive your guide is.
Bad examples of guide questions:
â Why?
â Tell me more about that.
â Slack integration
Improve these examples by clarifying what youâre referring to in the question:
â Why do you like / dislike the Slack integration feature?
â Tell me more about how you use the Slack integration feature
â How do you feel about the Slack integration feature?
This is important because each question is read by Looppanel independently. When it reads a question like âWhyâ or a title like âSlack integrationâ, itâs not clear what youâre interested in capturing. Clarify your questions to help Looppanel organize your notes even better.
Maintaining language consistency between your discussion guide and the language used during the interviews enhances the performance of AI Notes. For example, if you use an abbreviation like 'RFP' in your conversation but not in the discussion guide (or vice-versa), the model will have a harder time allocating your notes correctly.
âIf some sections in your discussion guide repeat or are very similar, this can impact guide assignment accuracy. For example, if in a concept test you have multiple questions asking âHow do you feel about this?â, Looppanel doesnât know where to put your notes. Instead try to include context in your questions to improve results (e.g., âHow do you feel about the Concept with ABC feature?â
âThe AI Notes feature is optimized for user interviews. Sessions that don't follow this format may experience lower accuracy or quality. For example, you may have context on your screen for a usability test that Looppanelâs AI is not reading. You may need to add and correct notes more for calls where data is in the video, and not just the transcript.
âRemove headers and instructions to yourself. Since these are not questions, theyâll just clutter your experience and confuse the AI.
Need help implementing these tips? You can tap on the *Suggest Improvements* Icon for AI to generate suggestions to the discussion guide.
Step 6: Click the Create Guide button
Click the Create Guide button. This will create your discussion guide and add it to your project.
By following these steps, you can add a discussion guide to your project and start using it to improve your user research.
Still have questions?
Reach out to us at [email protected]
đŹ Frequently Asked Questions
Can we update questions later?
Yes, you can update your discussion guide by editing existing questions or adding new ones at any time. However, please note that these changes will only apply to future calls analyzed with the updated guide. Notes and insights from past calls will not automatically get re-organized. You can manually re-organize notes from past calls, or re-upload them.
Is adding a discussion guide necessary? What happens to insights when conversation is more open ended?
No, a discussion guide isnât required. You can still rely on âAuto-Analyzeâ ( to learn more about it click here) to thematically tag your data and identify key themes from your project. We do recommend adding broader questions into your guide even if you have a less-structured conversation. This can help group your notes into relevant topics.
What happens if I donât assign a discussion guide before my call?
No worries! You can always assign a discussion guide after the call. Once you do, your notes will be automatically re-organized based on the questions in your guide. You donât miss out on organized insights, even if you didnât set your discussion guide up in advance - just make sure you add all your questions in in one go!