Asking Questions When You Have No Idea What to Ask

“Hey, could you design this screen for the analytics page?”

Huh?

We’ve all been there. You’ve been given a task, a prompt, an expectation… and you have no idea where to start. You’re told that you’re free to ask questions, but that’s not helpful, because you don’t even know what you don’t know.

So what do you do?

I’m by no means an absolute expert, but I am well acquainted with confusion and ambiguity. Regardless of the brief, there is often room for ambiguity that does lead to confusion on where to start. The way that I tackle problems is by the following:

1. Write down the confusion
2. Narrow down the brief
3. Assert any assumptions
4. Formulate questions

Write down the confusion

Believe it or not, there is a method to the chaos. Although it seems like your thoughts are all over the place and you don’t know where to start, you do know your points of confusion — even if you don’t know why you are confused.

Spill the tea

Open up a digital or paper document (or Figma, if you’re like me) and let those thoughts spill out onto the pages of the document. Write down your stream of consciousness and all the thoughts that pop into your head. This doesn’t need to be an extremely long exercise, but it does help materialize some of the confusion.

The analytics project is something I just got onboarded to so I honestly don’t even know what the point of this is… How much of the analytics page is already done? What’s the goal for this screen? All I know is that there are analytics on our company’s Shop pages for the vendors, but that’s about it.

Make connections

Once you’ve finished writing out your raw thoughts, read through the document, and identify pieces of the confusion that match up. To do this, ask yourself the following questions (and more!):

1. Why am I so lost in the first place? — I just got onboarded to the project, so I don’t have context.
2. What is the goal for this? — I don’t know what the point of the screen is…
3. Why do I need to do this? — What is the goal?
4. Are there parts of this that seem to be part of the same category? — I seem to be lost because I don’t have enough information.
5. What information is missing for me that I need to succeed in this task? — I need to know what has already been done, what the research says, and what the goal for this project is.

Once you start picking out more tangible sources of confusion, it will become much easier to know what you might start to ask, or at least understand where the confusion lies.

Narrow down the brief

Now that you might know the flavours of confusion, narrow down the brief so that you don’t bite off more than you can chew. Ask yourself the 5 W’s and 1 H. Gear the question so that it applies for your specific task.

1. Who am I doing this for? Who benefits from this task? Who assigned this to me? — Only our customers on the premium plan use analytics for this page, to help with their shop in some way, I guess.
2. What are the goals? What are the requirements? What are the constraints? — I think my manager mentioned that I have a few weeks to work on this screen, so this must be a specific part of the analytics page, not the entire thing.
3. Why am I doing this? Why does this have to be done?
4. Where does this apply?
5. When does this task need to be completed? When are the results of this task going to be used?
6. How do I need to do this?

It’s okay if you don't know the answers to these questions! These are exactly the gaps in our knowledge that will help us formulate what questions to ask moving forward.

Assert any assumptions

Now is your time to shine. This is when you will really get to be able to formulate your questions.

Based on the thoughts you’ve already collected, make assumptions. Make up solutions or opinions, even if you have no idea if they’re right or wrong. Create questions based on these assumptions, solutions, and opinions, and write those down. The answers to these questions, even if the assumptions were totally wrong, are going to point you in the right direction away from confusion.

Now it’s time to go to your manager (or professor, or TA, or coworker — whomever you know can help you)!

Preface the questions by saying that you’re trying to work through your own confusion and that you don’t know where to start so you’ve made some preliminary questions and assumptions in order to identify where to go next.

I am working through the task, and would love to ask questions! I was wondering, what is the goal of the analytics screen I am designing — is it to manage sales of an individual item? Could you point me to where research has been done already for the analytics page project as a whole?

Ask your questions, and note down the answers. This should highlight the gaps in your knowledge, affirm things you think you might already know that end up being true and point towards the specific aspects of the brief that you’re confused about.

Formulate questions

This is the final step! The previous steps have been preparing you for this moment. Use the knowledge (and the clarity where you know your knowledge lacks) that you gained in order to formulate questions.

1. Make sure you address your knowledge gaps and concerns with these gaps.
2. Be sure to be proactive — ask with the intention to learn.
3. Try to make questions that you know will be related to successfully

Hey, since I just unboarded onto this project, I think I don’t have the proper context to start designing the analytics page just yet. Are there user research and onboarding materials I can refer to so that I can understand the context of the analytics page? On top of that, what is the goal for the analytics page as a whole and how does the screen I am to design fit into that goal?

Phew. You’re done!

Illustrations from unDraw!