This guide walks you through the flow and all available settings so you can configure your study with confidence.
1. Choose Interview Type
When creating a study, you’ll first select your interview type:
Standard AI Interview – A traditional AI-moderated interview where participants respond via text, voice, video, or voice-to-voice.
Usability Testing – Participants complete tasks while interacting with a desktop website/prototype, mobile website/prototype, or mobile app, with optional screen recording.
Note: After setup, you can change the mode within the type you selected (e.g., switch from video to text within Standard AI Interview, or from desktop to mobile within Usability Testing), but you cannot switch between Standard AI Interview and Usability Testing without creating a new study.
2. Choose Mode
The modes you see depend on your chosen interview type:
Standard AI Interview
Text interview
Voice response
Video response
Voice-to-voice (experimental)
Usability Testing
Desktop website / prototype
Mobile website / prototype
Mobile app
3. Choose How to Create Your Guide
After selecting the mode, you’ll choose how to build your interview guide:
Start from scratch – Manually add questions and configure settings like Interview Method, Context for AI, Max # of interviews (optional), and checkboxes for Pass Metadata, Skip Walkthrough, and Enable Interviewer Voice.
For Standard AI Interviews, there’s also an option to Allow participants to switch to chat if their camera/microphone is not working.
Upload your own guide – Upload an existing interview guide file. Full instructions here.
AI-generated guide – Describe your study goals, then choose additional options such as # of questions, interview purpose (concept test vs. discovery), and question type mix (qual/quant).
For information on launching a study in languages other than English, please see this article.
4. Mode-Specific Options for Usability Testing
Desktop Website/Prototype – Add a link and optionally enable Record screen for duration of this question. The system will ask participants for permission to record their full screen for the entire interview.
Mobile Website/Prototype – Same as above.
Mobile App – Add the Mobile App Name and App Store link. Before starting, participants see a special onboarding screen with instructions to download the Outset app and then scan a code to start the interview. Screen recording runs for the entire session.
5. Editing General Settings After Setup
In addition to the usability study settings above, once your guide is created, you can edit questions and update General Settings:
Interview Method – Switch between modes available for your chosen interview type.
Interview Language – Choose from a wide range of supported languages (full list here).
Written In – Language your guide was written in (not editable).
Context for AI – Background information to guide the interviewer.
Maximum # of Interviews – Limit how many times the interview can run.
Checkbox options: Pass metadata to AI interviewer, Skip walkthrough, Enable interviewer voice.
6. Section Randomization
You can also randomize the order of sections in your guide:
Monadic – Each participant sees a randomized section or section(s) from the set you select.
Sequential Monadic – Each participant sees all selected sections, but in a randomized order.
By following these steps and using the settings that match your goals, you can ensure your AI-moderated interviews or usability tests run smoothly and collect the insights you need.
Hope this helps! If you have any further questions, please reach out to our team at [email protected] or via chat.