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On the surface, I’m fishing for questions to ask users, perhaps to include in a user research effort. But, really, what I’m curious about is what someone perceives as the gaps in their own knowledge about their users, visitors, customers. Perhaps it’s not their own gaps, but gaps they perceive in the collective knowledge of their team or organization. By getting them to focus on a single question directed at the target audience, I’m encouraging them to think about the aspect they know least about, or perhaps the aspect that’s most pressing.
This question illuminates misconceptions and mythologies best when asked of stakeholders who are important decision-makers, but have some distance from the users themselves.
Usually the people I ask aren’t responsible for driving interviews with users. They don’t have experience running research studies. So, the questions they come up with generally run pretty literal. In this way, these questions aren’t “user-centered” but instead center the product or service you’re working on.
This question comes up in stakeholder interviews, toward the beginning of a new project. I also ask it when planning a new research study, where the question they come up with is less hypothetical.
If they’ve centered the product or service, you can ask them to focus more on user needs. One way to do this is to suggest a question that centers the user instead. “I understand you’re interested what they click on first. I wonder if we could ask about the circumstances in which they use the product.”
Another approach is to ask “What’s your hypothesis?” That is, you can draw out what they think the answer to their own question is. This will shed further light on their own assumptions.
“I’m going to talk to some users next week. What topics do you think I should ask about?”
There are a few things going on in this variation. The question is less abstract because we’re talking about actual user interviews. This version asks for topics which may put less pressure on them to frame their response as a question.
“If you could ask first-time users one question, what would you ask?”
Here the “scope” is the types of users. By asking about a specific group, you create an opportunity to ask about other groups. This approach also may encourage your respondent to make their own questions more user-centered. By categorizing users, you’ve