Always Ask This One Powerful User Research Question

“Tell me about the last time you…”*

This is my desert island user research question. My “marry”, in the “boff, marry, kill” game. It’s my comfort food, my security blanket. My ace in the hole. It’s what I’ll what I return to when a conversation gets awkward or lackluster. Because it’s tried and true.

Hackneyed metaphors aside, I return to this particular query over and over again because it always leads to the best conversations. Why?

1. It doesn’t require people to synthesize information. If you ask someone a question like, “what do you dislike about Microsoft Word?”, they have to process a lot of information to give you an answer. They have to think about Word’s functionality, how they use Word, and then think about their frustrations and whether to voice them. On the other hand, if you ask them, “tell me about the last time you used Microsoft Word,” you can likely get at a lot of the same frustrations, while also capturing their habits, emotions, and specific examples of workarounds. These anecdotes will often end up being some of the most powerful pieces of data in your research.
2. “The last time” is easy for people to remember and discuss. It’s concrete and recent. People are typically much happier talking about specific instances from their lives than abstractions. I can easily tell you about my last run — how I felt, where I went, what music I listened to. If you ask me about my general perceptions of running and my neighborhood? Yeah, that’s a lot more difficult.
3. You can ask follow up questions based on your priorities. If you’re a good listener, you can go down all sorts of amazingly deep, useful rabbit holes with a few simple “whys” and “tell me more about thats.” Open-ended conversations like this can be incredibly powerful.

Like any tool, you have to use this question properly to get good results. Being a good listener and asking follow-up questions are both incredibly important. You don’t want your user giving you a one line answer — understanding the last time they did “something” should absolutely be a dialog with significant back and forth. Push them to really dig deep about why they did or didn’t do certain things; don’t be afraid to make them think or ask why. A good user researcher is OK with making people question their own assumptions occasionally.

So, if you ever are interviewing me, I hope you ask me this question. Because I’m pretty sure we’ll be able to have a great conversation. Anything else? No promises.

*To all the smart-asses in the audience — yes, I know this is technically not a question.

Published in Startups, Wanderlust, and Life Hacking

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