Setting up an interview study

An in-depth interview (IDI) study is a set of one-on-one video interviews run from one place. You set when you’re available, participants book their own time from a scheduling link, and each interview gets its own video room that is recorded and transcribed. An interview guide, built from the same activities as any Converge session, gives each conversation its structure.

How a study runs

Create the study and set the days and hours you can interview. That’s this page.
Build the interview guide, by hand or from a short brief with AI.
Add your team and connect calendars so busy times stay out of the bookable slots. See Team and calendars.
Share the scheduling link. Participants pick a time and get their own join link by email. See Scheduling and managing bookings.
Run each interview from the study’s agenda. See Running an interview.
Review the recordings and transcripts and turn them into a report. See Recordings, transcripts, and analysis.

A study has no roster groups or invitee list. Participants come in through bookings, and your colleagues are added on the study’s Team card.

Creating the study

On the Sessions page, click Create Session. Under What are you creating?, choose In-depth interviews. You need the Session Leader role or above.

The form is headed Interview study settings. Fields appear in this order.

Study title. Required. Participants see it in their confirmation email and calendar invite, so name it for them as much as for you.

Welcome Message and Cover Image. The same as on any session. See Creating a session.

Account Group. Which of your account’s groups owns the study. Hidden when you only have one. The group also decides which colleagues you can add as leaders.

Timezone. The timezone your availability is set in. Participants always see times in their own timezone.

Interviews open and Interviews close. The first and last day participants can book. A new study defaults to one week starting today.

Daily Start Time and Daily End Time. The hours interviews can be booked on each of those days. 9:00 AM to 5:00 PM by default.

Interview Duration (minutes). How long each interview lasts. 45 by default.

Buffer Between Interviews (minutes). The gap left between back-to-back interviews. 15 by default.

Additional Options. Collapsed by default: Participant Support Chat, Lock Anonymity, Session Creation Language, Show Participants Agenda, Disable Paste, and Show Consent. They work as they do on any session.

Click Create interview study. The study opens on its agenda page.

The create form only offers the same hours every day. If you need specific days, or different hours on different days, create the study first and then change it under Scheduling settings.

Building the interview guide

A new study’s agenda opens with Let’s build your interview guide and three ways to start:

Generate an interview guide with AI. Tell Converge who you’re interviewing and what you want to learn, and it drafts a guide.
Import a guide. Reuse one from your library or a previous study.
Start with an empty section and add your own questions and stimuli.

Generating opens Create Interview Guide:

Research Goals. Who you’re interviewing, what you want to learn, and any topics, concepts, or stimuli to cover.
Source Material. Optional. Up to three files, used for context or to reproduce a discussion guide you already have.
Interview length (min) and Interviewee, the kind of person you’re talking to, such as consumers, employees, or executives.

Click Generate Interview Guide. It usually takes one to three minutes.

An interview guide is shaped differently from a group guide. Expect a short introduction, two to four content sections that move from broad context to specific experiences to reactions, and a short closing. There are fewer, deeper activities, roughly one for every four to six minutes of conversation: Info screens to open a topic or show a concept, open-ended questions for the participant to reflect on, and Rate, Rank, or Select exercises followed by a “why”. The spoken conversation is the main data, and the activities anchor it.

From there the guide works like any other. Refine it in chat, add sections, and edit activities as described in Building the session guide. AI Guide and Import Agenda stay available at the top of the agenda.

Scheduling settings

On the agenda, click Edit IDI to open the study settings. Below Interview study settings are three cards that only interview studies have: Scheduling, Team, and Calendar Sync. The last two are covered in Team and calendars.

The Scheduling card shows the current rules at a glance. Click Edit scheduling to change them.

Timezone. The timezone the days and hours below are in.

Availability. Choose one of two modes:

Same hours every day. A first and last day, and one start and end time. Interviews can be booked on every day in the range, weekends included, within those hours.
Specific days & times. Only the days and time blocks you list are offered. Pick a date and click Add day, or use Add next day to keep going. Each day can hold more than one time block, for example a morning and a late-afternoon block, and you can copy a day’s blocks to the next day. Blocks on the same day can’t overlap.

Switching modes keeps what you entered in the other one, so you can switch back without retyping it.

Interview Duration (minutes). From 10 to 180.

Buffer Between Interviews (minutes). From 0 to 60.

Early Access (minutes before start). How early a participant can enter the room before their start time. 5 by default.

Minimum Notice. How far ahead a participant must book or reschedule, from None to 48 hours, so nothing lands on your calendar at the last minute. New studies start at 4 hours. Your team isn’t held to it when rescheduling someone from inside Converge.

How slots are worked out

Slots start at the beginning of each day’s hours, or of each time block. Each slot is one interview long, followed by the buffer, and Converge keeps adding slots for as long as a whole interview still fits. With hours of 9:00 AM to 5:00 PM, 45-minute interviews, and a 15-minute buffer, participants are offered 9:00, 10:00, 11:00, and so on through 4:00.

A slot is hidden from participants when:

it has already started, or starts inside the minimum notice;
another interview is already booked over it;
a calendar linked to the study is busy at that time.

Pausing bookings

The toggle on the Scheduling card reads Booking open or Booking paused. While paused, the scheduling link shows no available times and participants can’t move an existing interview to a new time. Interviews already booked stay as they are.

The schedule pill

The bar at the top of the study shows a pill with the first and last bookable day and a status: Not started, Open, Closed, or Paused. Leaders can click it to open the same scheduling editor without going to settings.

Preview, at the right of the top bar, opens a preview participant in a new tab. In an interview study it also creates a preview interview that starts now and appears in today’s list on the agenda with a flask icon.

Start that interview from your moderator tab and join it from the preview tab to test the call, the guide, and the recording end to end. Mute one of the two tabs to avoid echo. A preview interview sends no emails and never touches a calendar.

Preview data counts in results until you clear it. Click the flask next to Preview, then Clear, to remove the preview participant, their responses, and their preview interviews, including the recordings and transcripts. End the preview interview before clearing.