It’s hard to conduct research when you don’t know what question needs to be answered. Every research effort starts with you needing to know why something happens, what people do in certain circumstances, and how they perform key tasks. To answer these questions, we must find people to talk to and phrase our questions effectively to get to the heart of the matter. Otherwise, we would be making wild guesses and shooting in the dark. While that’s often tempting, this degree of freedom leads to failure and your product never seeing the light of day.

We can’t tell you how many times we’ve written down a question and thought, “This is it! This will get us some awesome information from people,” only to have it fall flat during a session. This happens to all researchers and it will happen to you. And that’s OK! Bad questions can be mitigated through the planning phase if you know what makes a question go bad. The following factors can lead to misinformed or poor research results.

If you’re just starting to build out your research skills, it’s important to avoid the aforementioned factors. However, once you get a few studies under your belt, you’ll find you can use leading questions and shallow questions in strategic ways. You can even use a participant’s personal and unconscious bias to drive to a deeper conversation about how people might use a product.

The only way to practice research is by finding people to talk to. The first few studies you run won’t be the best, and that’s OK! You will learn something after each session, even if every question you ask isn’t the best version of that question. The goal is to improve your line of questioning and to find ways to hold a meaningful conversation with someone rather than treat research like a verbal questionnaire.

We have both had our fair share of failing during our years as researchers. In the early days, we asked overly leading questions and missed important areas of discussion because we didn’t know what we were looking for. But thanks to mentors providing feedback and guidance, we eventually overcame these failings. We still make some mistakes today, and you will too, but as long as you have a consistent feedback loop in place, you’ll continue to improve and eventually master the art of research.

Every question starts with a purpose, or setup. This takes the form of what (description), why (explanation), how (process), when (situation), and where (context). It gives the participant an idea of the type and, more importantly, the length of response you expect out of them.

The area of inquiry is what you want to learn about—for example, how your product impacts or influences someone’s life.

Some responses to your questions will have an automatic “Why?” behind them. Asking for a participant to go into more detail or to explain the rationale behind their response is known as laddering, and it’s an aspect of a question that helps you get to deeper information and potentially impactful stories. We often joke this is when we get to act like two-year-olds, asking “Why?” to get more information regardless of the answer. The key is to probe enough without being obnoxious, though.

The best research sessions are focused conversations between you and a participant. The best way to make an interview or study session feel conversational is to string questions together so the whole session has a beginning, middle, and end. While it is helpful to think about how each question could set up the following question, it is important to keep the discussion fluid, something we will address more in Chapter 9 and Chapter 10.

Every question in your interview guide should tie back to why you’re doing research in the first place. Remember, every question should target a few key topics or events that relate to your product. If a question won’t, or doesn’t seem to, provide information that helps you understand these goals, it’s vital that you remove it from this line of questioning.

Example: Learn about how people determine which photos to share with family and friends.

Interviewers make many assumptions when planning the questions and discussion guide order. Some questions are designed to uncover rabbit holes, lines of conversation that diverge from the current topic. These are moments where you’ll go off-script and improvise the discussion. Rabbit holes are good to explore as long as you’re getting good information from them.

Example: Learn why photography matters to the participant.

We’ve talked about the importance of research sessions feeling more like conversations than a verbal questionnaire. To ensure this happens, your questions should build upon each other and help guide the participant through topics that have a natural pace. Abrupt changes in conversation can be off-putting and harmful to the information you collect. A sequence of questions may follow this order:

Voice from the Streets: Colin MacArthur, UX Designer and Researcher

In a few words, describe your job.

I try to figure out how the federal government can better serve its people. Often that starts by conducting interviews with people who do (and don’t) use government services.

How do you balance specificity and ambiguity in research?

I spend many of my days planning and conducting interviews with people who use government systems, data, and services.

Figuring out what we want to learn is the easiest part of my day. The hard part is translating our big research questions into good interview questions. We’re often trying to answer abstract questions (like “What’s hard about interacting with the government?”), but abstract interview questions aren’t fruitful. If I ask, “What was hard about your last interaction with the federal government?” I’ll get some confused stares, some answers about state governments, and a lot of unelaborated “It was OK.”

When we want to get at abstract questions, we give interviewees “handles” that make them more concrete. A common tactic is asking people to think about a recent, significant life change. As they describe what happened, interviewers ask follow-up questions that focus on what we’re interested in (interactions with the government). Another approach is giving people specific scenarios and asking them to respond. For example, instead of asking people how they feel about the government collecting health data, we might provide a couple scenarios for discussion.

The challenge is making handles useful, but not leading. If we started questions with very specific questions about particular life events, we could narrow conversations and miss unexpected topics. We try to balance making questions open (and nonleading) with making them easy to answer. That’s a hard balance to find, but the best approach is iterative. Repeatedly asking questions to friends and then asking them how hard they were to answer helps me. At the end of the day, I’ve succeeded when our questions both surface interesting questions and don’t put an enormous burden on the interviewee.

Process-oriented questions are great openers to research sessions, and also useful as topic transitions. They give participants an open area to talk about something they have done and how they did it. You benefit by gaining an impromptu checklist of things you want to learn more about.

Example: How do you design a photo album for a friend or family member?

People say the most interesting things, often without knowing why they said them. By requesting that participants explain their comments through the laddering method described earlier, you gain a deeper view into their world. This is where you find valuable information. This could be unexpected and surprising, or it could give you insight into exactly why people do certain things with your product.

Example: Why do you feel that photo albums are still a treasured keepsake in today’s world, where more and more photos are digital?

Everyone has his or her own unique way of looking at the world. Research helps you collect these points of view and add them to your own, allowing you to look at product features and roadmaps from a new perspective.

Example: What makes a photo worthy of going into a photo album?

There are many reasons why a participant might use your product at a particular moment. During an interview, you can ask for explanations about triggers that motivate their picking your product. You can also get insight into how long people spend performing certain actions and how much tolerance they have when something goes wrong.

Example: When do you think photo albums are most appreciated?

The motto of a good researcher is “there is no such thing as user error.” One thing you’ll learn is that many users will blame themselves. These are moments of exploration because you can get to the source of why errors are made and what frustrates users when things don’t work out for them.

Example: What do you do when you don’t have enough photos for an album you’re trying to create?

Some say that everyone is a designer, but not everyone can design. The solutions and ideas that participants share with you offer insight into the hidden problems that you didn’t know existed. Problems are hard to describe, and harder to identify. Half-baked solutions are the nondesigner’s way of expressing problems they experience. Those pseudo-solutions can be inspiration and guidance for your own product.

Example: If you could, how would you incorporate videos and other forms of media in the photo albums you create for your friends and family?

It’s always a good idea to validate your interview guide internally. From the product owner to the engineering team, these are the folks who are putting their time and energy into building a product, and their feedback helps refine and shift your lines of questioning. It’s important to reach out to coworkers who may not be directly involved with your product by conducting a full dry run of an interview. Dry runs give you the opportunity to become comfortable asking questions, and to collect constructive feedback that won’t negatively impact the data you gather during a session.