Learning to ask better questions when talking to users
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 questions would generate yes/no answers, so it was not always easy to dig much further into a topic with my users.
Even worse, I am guilty of having asked those super vague questions too:
- "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.
Lately I've been learning more about UX Research 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
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 wrote about how to create discussion guides here for anyone interested: https://www.envsion.io/blog/how-to-write-a-discussion-guide-for-impactful-user-interviews
