Most interview advice is build rapport, ask open questions. In practice that gets you polite nothing.
What works for me is staying concrete. I ask about one specific thing that actually happened, not what they think in general. Then I let it breathe. I allow the silence and wait for their pace instead of jumping in.
The reason I do it is the payoff. People end up landing on something they hadn't noticed about themselves, and that's the part I'm actually after.
Ten years in and it's still the hardest thing to hand to someone else. Half of why I built Koecle, launching Monday.
Hi Product Hunt. I'm Yuki, the maker.
I spent more than ten years doing design research, interviewing people to reach what they actually mean. Koecle is that instinct moved into an AI. You send someone a link, they talk, and one conversation turns into an insight report or the groundwork for a 1-on-1.
I didn't build it to be another efficiency tool. The AI handles the fact-gathering so a person can put their focus into the part that really matters, the careful work of shaping it.
It's day one and it's far from finished, so I'd genuinely rather hear where it breaks. If you try it, tell me the moment it felt like a real interview and the moment it felt like a bot. Both help.
Free to start: https://koecle.com
If you want the personal side, I wrote a longer piece on the six years that led here and why I moved this know-how into an AI. It's more founder story than product tour:
https://yukishinohara.substack.com/p/design-research-know-how-moved-into
But the thing that helps most is trying it and telling me where it breaks.
The no-account link for interviewees is such a nice touch for getting authentic responses. One thing that would help our team: an option to add a short pre-survey or screener question before the AI kicks in, so we can route different demographics into different interview tracks without sending them to separate links.
@c_kurtar55949 Thanks for this. The way Koecle works today, you design an interview around an audience you've already defined, so routing hasn't come up much. But you're right that once the group gets large and mixed, splitting people by attribute from a single link would save real work. Good input, I'm taking it back to the team to think through.
Out of curiosity, how big do your interview groups usually get? That's the case where this earns its keep.
@c_kurtar55949 Following up on this one. We built it.
You put a single choice question in the pre-survey, then pick a target interview for each option. Everyone still gets the same link, and each person lands in the track that matches what they picked. The response list shows which interview each respondent actually took, so the segments stay separated afterwards.
One thing beyond what you described: the targets are your own interviews in the same project, so each track can carry its own full guide instead of one guide with caveats for different groups.
Thanks for pushing on this. If you want it set up for your team, tell me the attributes you split by and I'll walk you through it.
We added a feature to Koecle, our AI interview service: the link stays a single link, and what gets asked changes based on the answer to the pre-survey.
Until now you had to build a separate link with separate settings for each segment and hand them out yourself. Now one link does it. The response list shows which branch each person went down.
Change how a 1-on-1 is run per department. Split current customers from the ones who left. Split by user segment for interviews on a new business. There are a lot of ways to use it.
We use it in our own design consulting work too, for user research matched to segment.
Part of what helps is that it is faster, but the real thing is that we can put more of our time into asking the right people the right things.
Koecle collects the facts first, so we get to spend our time where it actually needs to go.
We're still polishing it while we use it, so there's more coming.
We built an onboarding guide for anyone new to Koecle. You interview yourself, generate an article, then research reports, an insight report, a persona, and a journey map. Report generation is normally paid, but the guide lets you try it once for free.
Not seeing the guide? Open Account settings → Help & Support → Onboarding Tour → First Task Guide and hit Restart.