What can Jodie Foster teach us about good UX
An ode to skepticism or how right questions build better products
[light spoilers ahead]
In the fourth season of True Detective, Jodie Foster plays police chief Liz Danvers, who has a habit of telling her colleagues to ask the right question. She challenges them by saying, "That’s not the right question," and that’s the attitude we should expect from a Sr. UXer or product designer.
Jodie Foster’s quest for truth parallels the UX designer’s quest to uncover the real user needs and the real goal of a project. Whether it’s aligning stakeholders, conducting user research, or measuring success, the art of questioning is fundamental to the UX designer’s toolkit in every part of the design process. But, what exactly are “the right questions” and why are they so important?
Good questions are those that promote critical thinking and encourage team members to think deeply about the problem, rather than settle for the first answer that comes to mind. By fostering this mindset, they bring a better understanding of the problem you need to solve. Combine this with active listening, and you might uncover hidden insights and opportunities while mitigating the risk of jumping to assumptions about user behavior.
Let’s go through some situations where questions become crucial:
Alignment and problem framing:
Asking the right questions during the kick-off meeting can set the stage for a successful design process by setting expectations, and ensuring a clear understanding of the problem space and the scope. It also ensures that everyone is working toward a common goal and vision.
Some questions that might be useful at this stage are: Why are we doing this? What are we trying to accomplish? What specific problems or pain points are we trying to solve? Are we all on the same page regarding [x] issue? How does our design strategy align with the overall company’s goals and vision? What are the key metrics we want to have an impact on?
Conducting Research:
When conducting user research you need to be careful not to influence or lead the participant. Asking the right open-ended questions correctly can reveal motivations and pain points in user interviews while asking empathetic questions can provide a deeper understanding of the user’s perspective.
You can ask the user How would you do [x] task? How do you feel doing that? How would you describe what you are seeing on the screen?
Something essential you need to practice is embracing the awkward silent moments that follow asking a question. This can be a transformative practice. While it may feel uncomfortable at first, allowing space for silence invites participants to reflect more deeply and give you richer insights. As UX designers, we must resist the urge to fill the silence with our own assumptions or suggestions, which will ultimately lead to more meaningful results in our interviews.
Owning your metrics
When analyzing user and product data you have the opportunity to ask questions to fully understand what the numbers are saying and what’s going on.
I remember one project where we were looking at Time on Screen, which measures the average amount of time users spend on a particular screen. But that number doesn’t tell you much by itself, you have to look at the context and ask and re-ask questions to uncover what the numbers are really saying. It’s not the same to spend time on a standalone offer versus on a cross-sell or up-sell screen in the middle of a checkout flow.
We started by asking: Why does the user spend [x] seconds on the screen? Is it because they’re interested or because they don’t understand what to do? What might the user feel while using this particular flow of our product? Is the time on screen the same for our mobile users and our desktop users?
We were asking interesting questions, but we were asking the wrong people until we realized that we needed to go out and ask the user.
Sometimes the question is right, but it’s not the right time or the right stakeholder. Sometimes the question is right and you need to ask it again at each stage of the process. For example, are we hierarchizing information according to the objective of this screen? Are we caring about the user goal? Are we helping the user with this particular design decision? Is this aligned with the project goals?
Ask why and ask again
Asking why is always a good place to start and it’s extremely useful in framing the problem. In the 1970s, Sakichi Toyoda, founder of Toyota Industries, developed a method called “5 whys,” which consists of asking why repeatedly (at least 5 times) until you get to the root cause of a problem. Similar to Liz Danvers’ encouragement to keep asking questions, this method can help you not only improve the way you frame your design problems but also help you practice your questioning skills.
So, what can Jodie Foster teach us about good UX? Learn to ask good questions, and keep asking and asking until you find the right one. Never settling for surface-level answers can lead us to create better products and more effective and user-centered solutions. It’s an ode to skepticism, a call to embrace curiosity.
Bonus track: Overcoming Creative Blocks
When the team needs to approach a problem from a fresh perspective, you can encourage brainstorming and ideation by asking open-ended questions that challenge conventional thinking. One interesting exercise you can bring to the table is the “How Might We” methodology from Google Desing Sprint, a question format that helps the team move from problems to opportunities.
