User interview distiller

Interviews produce stories; decisions need claims. This skill turns transcripts into claims that carry their evidence, so nobody has to trust a summary. The output is for a room about to commit engineering months, and it must be true of every claim in it that a reader who disagrees can open the transcript at the quoted line and check. A claim whose evidence is the distiller's memory of reading is the thing this skill exists to prevent, and so is a count that cannot be traced to specific participants.

When to use

After a round of interviews, on the transcripts, once coding can be done in one pass across all of them.
Before a roadmap meeting where "users want X" is about to be said without a number attached.
To re-read an old round against a new question, by re-coding rather than by searching the previous summary.
To settle a disagreement between two people who both sat in the interviews and remember them differently.
Not for: sales calls, support tickets, or survey free-text. The quote-attribution scheme assumes a participant who consented to be quoted and an id that maps to one person.

Input

Supply all three. Say in one line which you were given and how many participants.

Transcripts, with participant ids. One id per person, stable across the file, in the form P1, P2 or equivalent. Every quotable line must be attributable to exactly one id. This is not a formatting preference: steps 2 and 3 count participants and every claim carries quotes with ids. Without ids the method does not work; see Edge cases.
The research questions the round was run to answer.
The team's assumptions going in — a list, even a rough one. Step 4 tests each one and cannot invent them afterwards.

On round size. Guest, Bunce & Johnson (2006, Field Methods 18(1):59–82) coded 60 interviews and found 73% of their codes present in the first six transcripts and 92% within twelve, with saturation at twelve. Hennink & Kaiser's systematic review of empirical saturation tests (2022, Social Science & Medicine 292:114523) puts saturation across studies at roughly 9–17 interviews for a narrow, homogeneous sample. The catalog's earlier "5–12" figure sat at the low end of that literature. Use 9–17 for a homogeneous group, more where the population is segmented, and note that these studies concern thematic saturation in a single population: two distinct user segments are two saturation curves, not one. Report the number you actually had and do not claim saturation you did not test for.

Thresholds above are defaults; report the thresholds you used.

Process

Code first, count second. Read each transcript and tag statements with a short code (export-manual, trust-numbers). Codes come from what people say, not from the assumptions. Do not look at counts until every transcript is coded; a code invented on transcript 7 must be checked back against transcripts 1–6 before it is counted.
Claims. For each code appearing in 2 or more participants, write a claim in neutral language and attach the participant count and the two most representative quotes with ids. [house rule] — 2 is the smallest number that can distinguish a pattern from a voice. It is a floor for listing something as a claim, not a threshold for believing it; a 2-of-9 claim is reported as 2 of 9 and reads as weak on its face. Every code at 2 or more becomes a claim, including one you would rather report only as a surprise; a code cannot skip the Claims section by being interesting.
Single-voice items go in their own section. Real, but not a pattern yet. They are not promoted by being interesting. Every code at exactly 1 participant appears here, so that the two sections together account for every code you assigned.
Assumptions cross-check. For each assumption: supported / contradicted / not addressed, naming the claim that decides it. Every supplied assumption appears, including the ones nothing touched.
Surprises. Things nobody expected and no research question asked about, quoted. A surprise points at the claim or single-voice item that carries it; it does not restate a count, and it never introduces a code the sections above did not list.
Report the denominator once, at the top, and use the same denominator everywhere. Where a topic did not reach every participant, carry the sub-denominator on the claim line and say how the topic reached the people it reached: 3/9 (asked of 5) when five were asked and nobody else raised it, or 3/9 (topic reached 6: unprompted in P4, then asked of P5–P9) when one participant raised it unprompted and the rest were asked. Never count a participant inside a sub-denominator they sit outside — if P4 is one of the three, P4 is inside the reach set, and the reach set is 6, not 5.

Rules

Every claim quotes. A claim without a quote is deleted, not softened.
Count participants, not mentions. One person saying it six times is one.
Never turn a request into a claim about need. "P3 asked for CSV export" is evidence for "P3 wants to work with the data elsewhere", and the claim says the latter, with the quote showing the request.
Leading questions are flagged. A question that names the answer ("was the export frustrating?") gets its answer marked [leading], and that answer cannot be one of a claim's two representative quotes. If every quote for a code is [leading], the code does not become a claim; it becomes a line in the single-voice section saying the round asked for it.
Preserve the participants' words. Do not clean up grammar, filler, or false starts. Elide only with […] and never across a change of subject.
Neutral language in claims means: no evaluative adjective, no product name as the subject, no "users love / hate / struggle with". State the behaviour and its object. "They rebuild our numbers in a spreadsheet before trusting them" is a claim; "users don't trust the dashboard" is a conclusion.
A claim states behaviour or belief, not a solution. If the claim names a feature, it is a request and belongs in evidence, not in the claim line.
A first-appearance statement is checkable. If you write that a code first appeared in P8, no participant before P8 may carry that code anywhere in the output. Re-read the Claims and Surprises sections against each other before you ship.

Output format

Example 1 — the normal case, with a leading-question flag and an empty assumption

## Round: data-trust interviews, 9 participants (single segment: finance analysts)
Denominator: 9 unless a claim says otherwise. Saturation not tested; 9 is the low end of
the 9–17 band in Hennink & Kaiser (2022). Two codes first appeared in P8 and P9, so this
round is probably not saturated — see Surprises.

## Claims (9 participants)
**C1 · 6/9 — They rebuild our numbers in a spreadsheet before trusting them.**
- P2: "I export it, sum it myself, and only then do I put it in the deck."
- P7: "the dashboard says one thing, finance says another, so I check, every time"
→ contradicts assumption A3 ("users trust the dashboard totals").

**C2 · 4/9 — Onboarding is done by a colleague sitting next to them, not by the docs.**
- P1: "[a colleague] showed me. I've never opened the help thing, is there a help thing?"
  (name redacted; the participant named a colleague who consented to nothing.)
- P6: "you learn it from whoever had the job before you, that's just how it went"
→ not addressed by any assumption.

**C3 · 3/9 (topic reached 6: unprompted in P4, then asked of P5–P9) — They keep a private
copy of the report because the shared one changes under them.**
- P4: "I duplicate it into my own folder because someone edits the shared one mid-month"
- P9: "mine's a copy. I know it's stale. I'd rather it be stale than move."
→ supports assumption A6 ("people fork shared reports").
Note: the topic came up unprompted in P4 and was then asked of P5–P9. P1, P2 and P3 were
never asked and never raised it, so the topic reached 6 of the 9, not 5. The three who
hold the code are P4, P6 and P9; P4 is inside the reach set because P4 raised it.

**C4 · 3/9 — They send the export to an external auditor as a routine hand-off.**
- P1: "the export is for the auditor, honestly. that's the only reason I open it."
- P8: "end of quarter I just send the CSV to the audit people, that's what it's for now"
→ not addressed by any assumption. Code `audit-handoff`, first seen in P1. Listed here
because it reached 3 participants; see Surprises for why it is also a surprise.

**C5 · 2/9 — They check a number's freshness before quoting it, and cannot find when it
last updated.**
- P3: "I always look for a timestamp. There isn't one. So I ask in Slack."
- P8: "if I don't know when it ran I won't put it in front of the board"
→ supports assumption A1 ("weekly usage") only weakly; A1 is about frequency, this is not.
Marked as not deciding A1.

Five codes reached 2 or more participants and all five are above. No other code reached 2
participants with a non-leading quote. One that reached 2 on leading quotes only is in
Single voices.

## Single voices
- P5 wants a Slack digest. No other participant mentioned notifications.
  P5: "just put it in Slack, I live there"
- P2 exports to Google Sheets specifically, not Excel. Everyone else who exports said Excel
  or did not say. Too small to judge whether the tool matters.
- Code `stale-tolerance` (1 participant, P9). Staleness is accepted as the price of a copy
  that does not move. First appeared in P9, the last interview.
  P9: "I'd rather it be stale than move."
- Code `board-sign-off` (1 participant, P8). A number that goes to the board is held to a
  different bar than one used internally. First appeared in P8.
  P8: "if I don't know when it ran I won't put it in front of the board"
- Code `mobile-check` (2 participants, P1 and P6) is not listed as a claim: both quotes came
  after the interviewer asked "do you ever check this on your phone?", which names the
  answer. Flagged [leading]. If mobile matters, ask it open next round.

## Assumptions
| id | assumption | verdict | decided by |
| A1 | users open the report weekly | not addressed | no claim establishes frequency; C5 is about freshness, not cadence |
| A3 | users trust the dashboard totals | contradicted | C1 (6/9) |
| A5 | people use this on mobile | not addressed | only evidence is [leading], see Single voices |
| A6 | people fork shared reports | supported | C3 (3/9, topic reached 6) |
| A8 | finance sign-off is the blocker | not addressed | nobody raised sign-off; the round never asked |

## Surprises
- C4, the auditor hand-off. No research question asked about auditors and no assumption
  named one, yet three participants describe the export as an audit artifact rather than a
  reporting one. The product does not mention auditors anywhere.
  P4: "the CSV goes to the auditor. it's not really a dashboard thing, it's an audit thing."
- Two codes (`board-sign-off`, `stale-tolerance`) first appeared in P8 and P9, the last two
  interviews, and both are still single voices. New codes arriving at the end of a round is
  the signal that the round is under-sampled. Recommend 4–6 more analysts before treating
  C3 or C5 as settled.

## Consent and redaction
Redactions: 1 (C2, P1 — a colleague's name replaced with `[a colleague]`). The colleague
is a third party; flagged to the research owner, not coded, not quoted further.
Consent on file for all 9 participants covers an internal report; it does not cover an
external deck. See Stop and hand back before this circulates outside the product team.

Example 2 — the refusal, too few participants

## Round: 1 participant — not distilled

Supplied: 1 transcript (P1), 4 research questions, 6 assumptions.

No claims produced. A claim in this skill means a code seen in 2 or more participants;
with one transcript every code has n=1 and the claims section would be the single-voice
section under a more confident heading.

What is returned instead:
- Codes found, with quotes, unaggregated: `export-manual` (3 statements), `audit-handoff`
  (1), `trust-numbers` (2), `no-timestamp` (1).
- P1: "I export it, sum it myself, and only then do I put it in the deck."
- P1: "end of quarter I just send the CSV to the audit people"
- Assumptions: all 6 marked **not addressed**. One transcript cannot support or contradict
  an assumption about a population.
  A1 not addressed · A3 not addressed · A5 not addressed · A6 not addressed ·
  A8 not addressed · A9 not addressed.
- Leading questions found: 1 (Q3, "was the export frustrating?"). P1's answer to it is
  excluded from the codes above.

This is interview notes, not a distillation. Do not take it to a roadmap meeting as
evidence about users. Guest et al. (2006) found 73% of codes in the first six transcripts;
one transcript is not a sample of anything.

Edge cases

Fewer than 2 participants. Do not produce claims. Return the Example 2 shape: codes with quotes, unaggregated, all assumptions marked not addressed, and a plain statement that this is notes rather than evidence. Never write a claim reading 1/1.
2 to 4 participants. Claims are producible but every one carries its denominator prominently, and the header says too small for pattern claims — read every count. Do not report percentages at these sizes; 3/4 is honest, 75% is not.
Transcripts with no participant ids. The method collapses. Every claim carries quotes with ids, every count is a count of participants, and neither is available. Do not assign ids by guessing at speaker turns, and do not attribute quotes to P?. Return no participant ids — cannot attribute or count, list the codes with their quotes unattributed and marked as such, and say exactly what is needed: a speaker label per turn, stable across the file. If the transcripts have speaker turns but anonymous labels ("Speaker 1", "Interviewee"), say whether those are stable within one file only — they usually are — in which case ids can be assigned per file and counting works across files but not within one.
Transcripts where interviewer and participant are not distinguished. Worse than missing ids, because the interviewer's words will be coded as findings. Do not proceed. Say so and ask for a labelled transcript.
Mixed segments in one round — three analysts and six admins. Do not pool them. Report claims per segment with per-segment denominators, and say which codes crossed segments. A 5/9 that is 5 of the 6 admins and 0 of the 3 analysts is a segment finding wearing a round finding's clothes. A segment of three or fewer is also a re-identification risk; see Stop and hand back before publishing its breakdown.
A topic that only some participants were asked about. Carry the sub-denominator per step 6 and name the reach set explicitly. If a participant raised the topic unprompted, they are inside the reach set: 3/9 (topic reached 6: unprompted in P4, then asked of P5–P9). A sub-denominator that excludes someone you counted in the numerator is an arithmetic error, not a rounding choice.
Transcripts too long to code in one pass. Code in order, keep the code list open, and re-check every code invented after the first pass against the earlier transcripts before counting it. Say how many transcripts you re-checked. Never count a code across a set you only coded forward.
A transcript is partial, cut off, or unusable — bad audio, half a session, a no-show. Exclude it, count it in the header (unusable transcripts: 2), and keep the denominator at the number actually coded. Do not silently drop it from the count.
No assumptions supplied. Section 4 cannot run. Say no assumptions supplied — cross-check not run and do not reverse-engineer assumptions from the claims; that produces a list every claim happens to support.
No research questions supplied. Claims and single voices still work. The Surprises section does not, because a surprise is defined against what was asked. Say so and omit it rather than nominating the most interesting claim.
Every quote for a code is leading. Not a claim. See the rules; it goes to single voices with the flag and a note to ask it open next round.
A quote identifies the participant — names their employer, their manager, a colleague, or a detail only they could have said. Replace the identifying span with […] or a bracketed role, note that you redacted, and count the redactions in the header. A pseudonymous id does not anonymise a quote that describes one person's job. Redacting is an edit you make; deciding whether the redacted quote may then circulate is not yours — see Stop and hand back.

Stop and hand back

Every quote here came from a person who agreed to an interview, not to publication, and the output travels to a room that will forward it. Stop means: the quote, the claim or the whole distillation does not leave this file until the named human clears it. Redacting is an edit you make; deciding what may circulate is not.

A quote the participant did not consent to have circulated. Consent to be recorded is not consent to be quoted, and consent to be quoted in an internal report is not consent to be quoted in a deck that leaves the company. If the consent record does not cover the audience this distillation is going to, hold the quote, write quote withheld — consent not established for this audience in its place, and keep the claim only if a second consented quote supports it. The researcher who ran the round decides, not the reader who wants the quote.
Personal or identifying detail in a transcript — a name, an employer, a manager, a team small enough to name, a health, immigration or legal circumstance, a salary figure. Redact per Edge cases, then stop before the file circulates: tell the research owner which participant, which span, and what you replaced it with. Do not decide by yourself that a redaction is sufficient, and do not leave the unredacted transcript quoted anywhere in your working output.
Re-identification risk in a small segment. A segment of three or fewer, or a claim that carries a role plus a company plus a behaviour, identifies a person even under a P4. Do not publish that segment's breakdown. Report the segment size and the claim to the research owner, offer the pooled figure, and say plainly that pooling hides a segment finding so nobody mistakes the pooled number for the whole answer.
Anything a participant disclosed about a third party — a named colleague, a manager, a customer, an employee of a vendor. That person consented to nothing and is not in the room. Do not code it, do not quote it, do not paraphrase it into a claim. Tell the research owner it is in the transcript so they can decide whether the transcript itself needs editing before anyone else reads it.
A request to attach a real name, e-mail or employer to a participant id. Refuse and say why: the ids are the anonymisation, and re-linking them after the fact breaks the terms the interview was granted under. Only the research owner holds that mapping, and whether to use it is theirs.
A participant withdraws, or a consent record is missing for one transcript. Drop that transcript, restate the denominator without it, count it in the header (withdrawn: 1, consent not on file: 1), and recount every claim and sub-denominator that touched it. Do not keep the quotes and drop the id.
The distillation will be used to decide something about the participants themselves — a customer's contract, an employee's role, a vendor's renewal. This skill produces evidence about behaviour for a product decision. Hand it to whoever owns that other decision with the scope stated, and never let a research quote stand in as a performance record or an account note.

License

MIT

user-interview-distiller