Interview Protocol.

Semi-structured interview protocol for expert practitioners in customer experience and educational technology. Designed for 15–20 minute sessions. Questions mapped to RQ1, RQ2, and RQ3.

1. Could you briefly describe your current role and the AI system or product you work on?

2. At a high level, how does your system currently track or respond to user behaviour?

1. When you observe users interacting with your system, what behavioural signals do you find most informative for understanding their experience?

2. Which behavioural signals do you currently track or observe in your product — such as hesitation patterns, navigation switching, re-engagement after drop-off, help-seeking behaviour, or changes in interaction pace?

   Are there signals available in your data that your team does not currently use for personalisation or intervention?

1. When you see a user hesitate or pause during a task, what do you typically infer about their experience? How confident are you in that inference?

2. I will show you a brief summary of the ABSD framework (see the summary card below). Looking at the four layers — Action, Behaviour, State, Drive — does this structure map to how you think about user understanding?

3. Can you give an example from your domain where a behavioural pattern clearly indicated an underlying psychological state? What about an example where the same signal was ambiguous?

4. What contextual factors (domain, task complexity, user history) most affect how you interpret behavioural signals?

5. When your system makes an assumption about a user's state — such as inferring they are frustrated or confused — how do you currently validate whether that assumption was correct? Do you use any form of explicit user feedback?

6. Moving beyond momentary emotional states, does your team ever attempt to design for or measure a user's underlying psychological drives — such as their need to feel competent, their need for autonomy over choices, or their need for connection?

1. If you had reliable state-level inference about your users, how would it change the way your system responds?

2. What are the biggest practical barriers to implementing state-aware features in your current system?

3. Does the ABSD framework provide vocabulary or structure that would be useful in your product or design discussions?

4. What is missing from the framework? What would you add, remove, or restructure?

1. Is there a specific use case in your domain where understanding user motivation would have the highest impact?