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Don’t ask users your burning questions

What you want to know and what you ask aren’t the same thing

Kim Witten, PhD
UX Collective

Two women stood opposite, each holding a partially open basket. Question marks fly from the one on the left, light bulbs from the one on the right. Text overlay: Research questions ≠ User questions.
Image credit: SIphotography from Getty Images Pro. Designed in Canva.

I recently worked with an amazing team of talented people to design a user survey for a large community. These were accomplished professionals with a wide range of valuable experience across many domains. However, they had limited user research or survey design experience.

This sort of design gap is quite common among spontaneously formed teams of people aiming to solve a problem together.

And really, how hard could it be to create a simple survey?

Research questions ≠ User questions

For uninteresting reasons, I joined the team some time after the others. As I was catching up, I discovered that they had made a lot of progress on drafting a survey with a variety of questions for their userbase, having had very productive, thoughtful conversations about wording, tone, privacy, and other aspects of the questions they proposed.

As I reviewed the survey draft I was reminded of a very important lesson I learned during my user research career:

Your research questions are not the same thing as your user questions.

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Written by Kim Witten, PhD

Helping all kinds of thinkers make better sense of what they do. Get unstuck every Thursday with Hold That Thought at www.witten.kim/subscribe

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