The Value of Asking Deep Questions and Fostering the Research Mindset
As a UX researcher you are in demand!
When people hear there is a researcher in the team, they will come to you with all sorts of questions and the expectation (sometimes explicit, sometimes implicit) that you will get them the answers.
This is not a bad thing per se. In fact, we want people to come to us with questions.
However, the problem in asking questions is, you can ask anything and you will get an answer. Really anything, any question! But will the answer be valuable?
If you want, you can ask ‘will people buy beer that comes in a Tetra Pak?’
Or, much closer home to software user experience, you can ask ‘will people download the app that does something or the other?’.
You will certainly get an answer, but what are you going to do then? If let’s say 60% of the people you asked said they would download the app, would you build it? Based only on that data? Well, you could. But what’s the guarantee that these people are going to do what they said they will do?
And why should they? What if the app is not valuable to them in the end? What if they don’t need an app? What, if they don’t need our app?
- Human beings are basically irrational,
- People cannot really imagine the future,
- What people do is not the same as what they say they do,
- Human behavior is not consistent,
- People judge the future based on their current behavior,
- Multiple external and unforeseen factors have an influence on the future.
You see where I’m getting to, right?
The first thing we should always do is try to understand our users and their needs. I wrote about it here. Thinking that we know what our users want is a myth.
Another myth is running research with the expectation of getting bulletproof answers in the sense of “the research will tell us what to do”.
Unfortunately, research doesn’t give ultimate answers. It’s not the Oracle of Delphi. Trust me, I am Greek ;-).
Research won’t predict the future. What it does, is to help us build our own point of view and make informed and evidence-based decisions.
Based on the knowledge we accumulate over time we can use our judgement to make decisions. By trying to understand the reasons behind why a user does or doesn’t do something, we can use our judgement and decide the value of making a change in a design, for example. Especially when we get ambiguous research results — and to be honest, in most cases we get ambiguous results. And, btw it’s ok to interpret the data and it’s also ok to make decisions based on what we think feels natural.
Every software development project requires a series of decisions. And research leads to evidence-based decisions. End user input should never be used as the sole source of truth though.
Look at Covid and the huge amount of solid data that is available; on its transmission, spread, mortality rate and much more. And look at how different countries made different decisions in response to the pandemic. Some governments imposed much harder lockdowns and restrictions than others. They all had access to the same (vast) amount of scientific data, but there was not the one and only approach. Governments followed different approaches and strategies (e.g. mitigation versus elimination) and made different decisions based on their country-specific situation.
Let’s distance ourselves from the expectation that research provides ultimate truths, let’s get rid of an output-oriented approach of delivering research artifacts as fast as possible and switch towards an “asking deeper questions mindset” (the Research Mindset).
Ask questions, many questions, not with the intention to immediately start executing research activities, but to understand your problem space better.
Understanding the problem space better helps us to ask the right questions and get much more valuable insights than, if we jump too fast into the execution mode.
As Chilon the Lacedaemonian (one of the Seven Sages of Greece) said “σπεύδε βραδέως“: act with a sense of urgency, but at the same time be intentional and purposeful.
Focusing on questions first,
- fosters critical thinking and deepens our thought process,
- stimulates reflection and looking at things from different perspectives,
- helps articulating what we know and formulating hypotheses,
- helps articulating what we don’t know.
Assuming we are doing all the above together as a team (highly recommended), it promotes collaboration and team spirit.
Remember, as a UX researcher you are in demand!
Use this as an opportunity and exercise deeper thinking with the teams you are working with. Practice the Research Mindset, create space for a strategic approach and decide how you want to bring UX research into play to inform critical decisions instead of answering meaningless questions.
Keep in mind: The Research Mindset starts even before we consider doing/executing user research!
Note: all product people should practice and foster the Research Mindset, not only UX researchers. I address the article to UX researchers, because this is the role I am most familiar with ;-)
Thank you Malli Konduri for reviewing my story and giving valuable feedback!
