Interview Notes Template

An interview is only as good as the notes it leaves behind

Whether you run user research or report stories, the interview itself is the easy part. The value is in what survives: the exact quote you can put in a report or an article, the theme that turns out to repeat across six participants, the follow-up question you forgot to ask. Notes taken in a single stream of consciousness preserve none of that reliably — two weeks later, you can't tell what the participant actually said from what you concluded about it.

This template keeps the three things an interview produces strictly separate: themes (patterns you noticed), verbatim quotes (evidence, with timestamps), and follow-ups (what to chase next). Copy it for every session, and a stack of individual interviews becomes a comparable dataset instead of a stack of impressions.

The interview notes template (copy and paste)

# Interview Notes — [Participant ID / name] · [Topic]

**Date:**
**Interviewer:**
**Participant:** (ID or pseudonym, role / background)
**Session type:** user research / journalism / other
**Recording consent:** given · how (verbal on recording / signed form)
**Recording / file link:**
**Session goal:** the 1–2 questions this interview needed to answer

## Quick summary (3–5 lines)
-

## Themes
- Theme: … | How strongly it came through: … | First raised by
  participant / in response to a question

## Verbatim quotes (with timestamps)
- [00:00:00] "…"

## Notable moments
- Surprises, contradictions, emotional shifts, long pauses — and the
  timestamp for each: …

## Follow-ups
- Question not asked / to dig into next time: …
- Claim to verify elsewhere: …
- Person to interview next (referral): …

## My interpretation (kept separate from the record)
- What I think this means — clearly marked as my reading, not the
  participant's words: …

The last section is deliberate. Interpretation is valuable — it's your job — but it has to be labeled, because in a month the unlabeled version becomes "what they said" in your memory and in your team's.

Example: filled in for a user research interview

# Interview Notes — P07 · Meeting overload study

**Date:** Thursday, Oct 16
**Interviewer:** Dana (Research)
**Participant:** P07 — product manager, B2B SaaS, team of 9
**Session type:** user research
**Recording consent:** given, verbal on recording
**Recording / file link:** [session file]
**Session goal:** Understand how PMs keep track of decisions across
recurring meetings; find where follow-ups fall through.

## Quick summary (3–5 lines)
P07 runs 22–25 meetings a week. Decisions are tracked in three places
(doc, chat, memory) and the third is the real system. Biggest pain is
not the meetings themselves but re-litigating decisions whose context
was never written down.

## Themes
- Theme: "Decisions evaporate" | How strongly: central — returned to it
  unprompted 4 times | First raised by participant (opening answer)
- Theme: Notes are written for other people, not for herself | Strong —
  she keeps a private shorthand doc "nobody else would understand"
- Theme: Status meetings exist to rebuild shared context, not to decide
  | Moderate — mentioned once, with a concrete example

## Verbatim quotes (with timestamps)
- [00:04:12] "I don't have a meeting problem. I have a
  remembering-what-we-agreed problem."
- [00:11:47] "The doc says one thing, the chat says another, and the
  truth is whatever the loudest person remembers."
- [00:19:03] "Half my Monday status meeting is just archaeology —
  digging up what we already decided in September."

## Notable moments
- [00:14:20] Contradiction: said she "trusts the team doc completely,"
  then described checking it against her private notes before every
  leadership meeting.
- [00:23:55] Long pause and laugh before answering how many follow-ups
  she personally tracks — "Do you want the real number?"

## Follow-ups
- Question not asked: How does she handle decisions made in meetings
  she didn't attend? → add to guide for P08–P10
- Claim to verify: "4 of 9 beta teams" style drop-off — ask whether her
  team has data, or if it's a feeling
- Referral: suggested interviewing her engineering lead, "he lives in
  the follow-ups"

## My interpretation (kept separate from the record)
- My reading: the private shorthand doc is the tell — the official
  system fails quietly and everyone maintains a shadow one. Worth
  probing as a study-level theme, not just P07.

Two details worth copying from the example: every quote carries a timestamp, so any claim in a later report can be traced back to the moment it was said; and the contradiction is recorded as an observation with a timestamp, not resolved into a conclusion on the spot.

How to use this template well

• Fill the header and the quick summary within an hour. The summary forces you to decide what the interview was about while you still remember the shape of it. Themes can be refined later; the summary can't be reconstructed later.
• Quotes must be verbatim, or they don't go in the quotes section. If you're paraphrasing, it belongs in themes. The fastest way to lose credibility — in a research readout or an article — is a "quote" the recording doesn't support. Timestamps are your proof; keep them attached.
• Use the same theme labels across interviews. Themes only become findings when P03, P07, and P11 share a label. Keep a running list of theme names for the study or the story and reuse them, rather than inventing synonyms per session.
• Journalists: the consent line and the follow-ups section do extra work for you — note what was on the record, what needs a second source ("claim to verify"), and who else to call. For user researchers, the same structure maps directly onto a synthesis wall or spreadsheet: one row per theme, quotes as evidence cells.
• Write the interpretation section honestly and keep it last. Editors and stakeholders will read it; participants' words must still be findable underneath it, untouched.

For the workflows around this template, see CoHear for researchers and CoHear for journalists and podcasters.

How recording changes the notes you can take

Notes this structured are hard to produce while also holding a conversation — listening, prompting, and typing timestamps don't coexist well. That's why most interviewers record. With CoHear, the interview records on your iPhone — no bot joins, which matters for video calls with participants who'd be put off by one, and it works the same sitting across a table — and you get the transcript with verbatim quotes tied to their timestamps, plus an organized summary in about 65 seconds for a one-hour session. A 4+ hour recording capacity covers a full day of back-to-back interviews.

The practical effect on this template: the quotes section fills itself with checkable evidence instead of your best recollection, and you can interview with your eyes up. You still write the themes and interpretation — that's the analysis, and it should stay yours. Always get consent before recording (the template's header has a line for it), and follow your organization's or newsroom's policy on retention.

If meetings are more your world than interviews, the meeting notes template applies the same decisions-and-evidence structure to team sessions.

More templates

• All note-taking templates