Learning to ask better questions when talking to users
Ask better questions during user interviews to uncover deeper insights that help your team make better decisions.
In the past I was asking too many closed or very hypothetical questions when doing user interviews, so I was not getting the most out of these conversations. For instance a lot of the questions I asked would generate yes/no answers, so it was not always easy to dig much further into a specific topic with my users.
Even worse, I am guilty of having asked super vague hypothetical questions like:
"would you use my product?"
"if you had this feature, what would you do with it?..."
Those are not good questions because the answers they elicit are not based on the user's experience, but instead appeal to their opinion over matters they are not familiar with. You are likely to get very misleading answers. We certainly did at EnVsion.
Interestingly, I've been learning more about UX Research lately for two main reasons:
it is the main use case for our product (I am not a user researcher myself)
I want to learn to ask better questions
I want to improve our problem discovery and decision making process
We're now using discussion guides (a UX technique) to conduct our user interviews and discovery calls. I must say I'm impressed: it's enabled us to get much more insights from these conversations and understand the core problems our users face.
You don't have to be a UX Researcher to use a discussion guide. In fact I recommend any founder or person talking to users/customers, to create and use such a document. It will make your conversations much more productive.
I also wrote a more elaborate post on how to create effective discussion guides here too: https://www.envsion.io/blog/how-to-write-a-discussion-guide-for-impactful-user-interviews
Thanks for reading this post! I share my learnings and progress while building my startup EnVsion! EnVsion helps UX researchers & founders to create clips of key moments in user interview videos in seconds!
You can also follow my journey on Twitter.