The Art of Asking [Questions]

1. Welcome to the Art of Asking [Questions]! : Hey, my name is Erica, you know, and I am a UX designer and researcher and design educator. And this is the art of asking questions. A skill share course about how to ask questions well, especially with respect to design, design, research and creative problem solving. So whether or not you consider yourself a designer, design educator, design researcher, creative or don't identify with any of it, you are welcome to be here. Glad you're here and hope that this course will help you to think about how to ask questions better. So questions are everywhere. We ask questions all of the time, and people always ask us questions. And sometimes we don't necessarily think about how to frame questions in orderto really find out what we're looking for. So this class is really geared towards how we can refine our craft of asking questions in order to especially really a better understand where people are coming from and what people want and need when we are designing. So let's get started. So let's talk a little bit about course objectives. So the first course objective is to explore why questions matter in design. We ask questions all the time. People ask us questions all the time, and we don't always think about why questions are really important. So we'll dig into why they matter. And when we are designing and doing some creative problem solving, the second objective is to learn ways to ask good questions in design research. So there's so many different ways to ask questions. We're gonna talk a little bit about some methods to use, but also to see how to structure questions so that you can really gather a lot of information from people. And third will practice creating in asking questions for design research. So we'll have an actual class project or a real world project to focus on as we create in craft some questions, and you will have the chance to actually practice asking those questions if you would like . So here's some of the things to expect for this class. This is on all levels course and everyone's welcome, so no previous experience or special tools are required. The only thing I ask is that you be willing to be curious and to find your growing edge, so that'll be really important for being successful in this class and really taking as much as you can out of it is to be willing to step out of your comfort zone and to find new ways to grow and learn s so that you can build your skills as a design researcher and a somebody who asks questions. So let's talk a little bit about the class Project prompts. So imagine that you've been test with designing the perfect party, but you are a designer in a design researcher. And do your job is not to design the perfect party for yourself, but to design the perfect party for people in the target audience. So you will identify a group of people to focus on as your target audience and then work with them to create a set of questions and ask a set of questions to them to find out what they think is the perfect party and what they want and need out of out of a perfect party. So that's gonna be the topic that we focus on. Of course, if you want to modify this and create your own prompt and practise the exercises with your own prompt, that's totally fine, too. This is just one suggestion. So we'll talk a little bit more about the class project as we dig into the course content. So let's start doing that. And up next, our first video, what the content is going to be around asking questions and why we asked those questions, so see you there. 2. Why ask questions? (and how?): in this video, we'll talk about why questions matter, and we'll also talk about some common methods for asking questions, especially within UX design and design research. Questions are an essential part of problem solving. And as UX designers and design researchers, it's especially critical that we include questions in every part of our work. We have to make sure that we're addressing the appropriate problems and that we have to find the right problems to address, to begin with, and to do so, we have to ask a lot of questions. So let's talk in more depth about why questions are critical for problem solving and design questions. Help us understand what people need, not what we think they need. We live in a world where people often make decisions about other people without the input of them, which often results in designs that don't actually meet people's needs or can cause more harm than good. Asking questions is one step in many that helps hold us accountable to designing with our target audience is at the center and to make sure we're designing based on what they want in need, not what we want need or what we think that they want need. In a similar vein, we ask questions to check our bias season assumptions. We have by a season assumptions whether we like to admit them or not, and it's important to acknowledge them so that we can work to minimize them as we design. Questions can play an important role in not only naming by a season assumptions but in dispelling and addressing them to We also ask questions to gather unknown information. There's information that we know we don't know, and then there's information that we don't know that we don't know. And well crafted questions can help us learn. Both questions can lead to insights that shift the direction of projects in key ways that we might not otherwise see. We also ask questions to observe patterns by asking questions and generating insights. We can begin to identify trends and commonalities and what people share, which could help us identify design priorities and design decisions. We also use questions to generate ideas. We not only use questions to learn about the past and current experiences, but to also brainstorm possibilities for the future and thoughtful, compelling questions conspired. Transformative ideas finally and not in the least way we ask questions to learn us. UX design is a constant process of learning and adapting, and questions help us ensure that the quality of the products and experiences that we're designing is really great. Questions are a means for problem definition, for ideation, for prototyping and gathering feedback. And if we're not constantly learning as we're designing, we're not designing well. So we talked a little bit about why it's important to ask questions. And now let's talk about some ways to ask questions. There are many ways to do so, and you might be familiar with some of these methods and categories are ready, but we're gonna cover some. So one common method of asking questions is through surveys where participants answer a set of questions often on their own time and then submit their responses. Surveys could be done in person or remotely, and vary in length. They could be easy to distribute and can be easy to gather a lot of responses in little time, but it's hard to ask. Follow up questions and surveys. Survey responses can be often too brief, and cleaning data can sometimes be time consuming. Interviews are another common method for asking questions and will be a method that we focus on in this class. Interviews are wear, researcher asks questions to a participant in real time. They can also be done face to face or remotely, and can vary in duration. Interviews could be helpful for gathering deep information, but can take a lot of time and bandwidth to carry out. Diary studies are method where participants track certain activity for a given period of time. They could be helpful for measuring participants relationships to a particular behavior activity over time, which can uncover patterns for our designs. Diary studies may or may not involve a researcher asking participants questions about the behaviour being measured, too. Focus groups are like group interviews. They are a method where a group of participants engaged in a guided dialogue around a specific topic and contextual inquiry is like a combination of observation and interviews. It's a method where researcher observes a participant within their own environment in order to better understand how a participant engages within that environment. So, for example, if a design researcher is looking to design an ideal party, they might conduct contextual inquiry with research participants by attending a party with them and asking them questions about the party experience While it's taking place. Contextual inquiry could be helpful for understanding people's thoughts and actions, but might be obtrusive depending on the scenario and so on. So there are many methods for asking questions, and these are just some common methods, especially within design research. But I encourage you to check out and look for other at methods to and in addition to methods. There are many ways to ask questions, and we're gonna delineates some of those here. So first there's synchronous and asynchronous engagement. Synchronous engagement is where people are engaging in real time. At the same time, interviews, contextual inquiry and focus groups are often done synchronously. On the other hand, asynchronous engagement is where Participant engages on their own time in a researcher of used their responses later at at a later time, after a participants completion, service diaries are often done. A synchronously remote engagement is where a participant in researcher or not in the same physical space. So phone interviews, video chats and online interviews are some ways to ask questions remotely. On the flip side, in person engagement is where the participants and researchers are in the same physical space at the same time. Group engagement, like focus groups, is where there are multiple participants engaging at once. Whereas one on one engagement is where there's one participant in one researcher engaging at the same time before asking questions or even drafting them. It's important to consider how you're gonna ask questions. Are you going to conduct a survey? Are you going to conduct a lie? Focus groups will you do in person interviews? While this course doesn't go into detail about each method, I'll share some Resource is with you in the about section of this class so that you can check him out and figure out which methods are most appropriate for the particular scenarios that you're looking for. As we wrap up this video, here's a question to consider as food for thought. Why do questions matter to you, or why else to questions matter, I encourage you to share your ideas in the class community, and I look forward to seeing what you share in our next video. We'll dig into talking about knowing who would ask when you're asking questions. Hope to see you there 3. Knowing who to ask: defining a target audience: in this video we'll talk about defining our target audience is this is an important step for generating questions because our target audiences will shape the questions that will need to ask. In this video, I'll introduce several key questions to consider when defining and refining your target audience, and we'll close out with thinking about our target audiences for our class project. So let's dive in the first question to consider when defining your target audiences. Do you have known or unknown target audiences? In some projects? We already know who the target audiences are, and in others we have to use research to identify or refine our target audiences. And sometimes we start projects thinking that we know who our target audiences are. But through the research process, we redefine or change our target audiences. Another question to consider when defining an audience is how Maney audience groups do you have. If you don't know who your target audiences are, yet you might not be sure how many audiences you have, and that's OK. As you begin to define your audiences, be mindful of the segments or groupings of audiences you you may have depending on the audience is and your project. You mightn't ask different questions of different audiences, consider different methods of reaching different audiences and prioritize the order in which you reach different audience groups. Or in some projects, you might just have one target audience. Another question to consider is how precise and specific are your target audiences. This can be a balancing act. We want target audiences to be specific enough to understand the unique problems that they experience and design approaches that meet their unique needs. If we have target audiences that air to Brad, it can be hard to identify common patterns among audience needs. And we can end up with water down insights and approaches that kind of fit everyone without fitting anyone really well. At the same time, we want target audiences to be broad enough to be inclusive of many people. And if our target audiences air to specific, we might have trouble recruiting participants or might end up designing approaches that don't meet need the needs of everyone who isn't part of that specific target audience. We have to balance universal design with specific design. Another consideration when defining your target audience is to consider how you specify who your target audience is. Specifications can be around identities and demographics, but they don't have to be. And sometimes demographic information isn't the best way to define target audiences. Other ways to consider target audience groups include how people currently behave, how people currently use existing products like phones or APS, and lifestyle choices and lifestyle types. Another consideration is how you're going to reach your target audience for research. Recruitment is a key step in asking questions, and we need to find people who agreed to answer our questions and share their insights, and that could take some planning. It's important to recruit people who do fit the target audience. If you're starting a project with unknown audiences, though, you may start with recruiting a very wide pool of participants and find that you refine and narrow down as you learn who your intended audiences are. One. Recruiting do make sure to recruit outside of your own personal networks, even if your personal networks are within your target audience. The reason for this is that we tend to form echo chambers and have social circles with similar values, beliefs and interests as our own, So recruiting solely within these networks can contribute to biased and skewed insights in our research. It's also important to recognize whether or not you are part of your target audience. If so, keep in mind the potential for the bias of designing for oneself when were part of the target audience. It's easy to make design decisions based on our own beliefs and needs, subconsciously or not or consciously, Even if we're not part of the target audience. This can happen where we design based on our own preferences. And as I mentioned earlier, we naturally hold assumptions and biases. And it's important to recognize and name these as much as we can so that we can work to directly address and minimize thumb. It's important to recognize when we are part of the target audience, so that we can be proactively careful to design beyond our own beliefs and needs. In a similar vein, it's important to consider the biases and assumptions we might have about our target audiences by naming these biases and assumptions. Early on, we can look to mitigate them because we might embed them into our questions, and we can craft smarter questions. So, for example, if I'm working on designing the ideal party, and my target audience is third grade kids who like Star Wars. I might have the assumption that all kids who like Star Wars will enjoy Star Wars themed parties. But this is an assumption that isn't grounded. In fact, I have no information to back this up. If I work without recognizing this assumption, I might develop a set of questions for research around Star Wars themed parties. One in reality, that's not what my audience wants or needs. So name any bias season assumptions that exist and name them early and often in an effort to design around them and to design better questions and last but not least ask, Do you hold systemic power and privilege over your target audience? If so, how? It's important to consider how power in polluted shape, how we define it, interact with our target audiences. Power dynamics are everywhere, and often as designers and researchers, we have power, privilege and status over people in our target audience. Think about how the power you may hold influences, how people might respond to you. It might affect how comfortable people are in participating, how fully people feel that they can respond to the questions, how and whether they want to participate at all, even if they say they dio. Whether you're working on a project where you hold clear power and privilege over a target audience, it's important to cook thoroughly. Consider the potential unintended consequences or harm that the project might cause. And if there's known harm or negative impact, address them before proceeding with any research. We have to also remember that intent doesn't always equate to impact. I often see these people designing for and not with the people being impacted by the design . But it's important to consider shifting design process is to not just include audiences and research, but to include them in the design process of collaborate as collaborators and to design with and not for so those are some questions to consider as you define your target audience and work your way towards creating questions. Now it's your turn to practice as a class project. Think back to the design prompt of designing a perfect party, select the target audience for this topic and decide who you're going to focus on is you create and ask questions. Share your ideas of the class community for feedback to in the next video, we'll dig into the core of this class, which is crafting questions, really looking forward to it and hope to see you there. 4. Crafting [good] questions: now that we've talked about why questions matter, ways to ask questions and how to define target audiences, let's talk about crafting good questions. I'm extra excited to share some tips that I've seen work really well, especially in the context of design research and to share some sample, Do's and dont's for structuring questions. So let's get started. A first step for framing questions, especially as a means to gather qualitative data, is to ask open ended questions. These are questions that could be answered with elaboration in contrast with closed questions, which could be answered with just one word or a few words like yes or no open ended questions encourage people to share and explain, whereas closed questions constrain the risk force responses that people can give. With open ended questions, we can often learn and gather context and nuance that we can't learn from closed questions . Open ended questions often start with words like what? Why and how and some examples of open ended questions include What kind of parties do you enjoy? How do you decide which parties to attend? Why do you think all of these questions were required respondents to explain their answers and this can lead to insights that we might not otherwise find if we're limited to closed questions. So here are some examples of closed questions, which are structures we want to try to avoid. Do you like parties? Have you ever been to a party? Do you ever use Instagram to find events? These questions can be answered. Yes, no, and don't really give us much information. So if you find yourself asking closed questions, try to follow up with questions like why? Or how to facilitate further explanation The second typist to ask about concrete experiences over hypothetical ones. It's common for people to say one thing and do another. And when we ask about hypothetical situations, people say, people say they might behave in a certain way when in reality, they don't on. And on the other hand, if we ask questions about past experiences, they can draw from what happened and what they actually did versus what they think they might dio. Of course, there are still limitations to this in that people can recall events differently than how the events actually happened. So do you keep that in mind, too? So let's talk about some examples of framing concrete questions or concrete experiences. Tell me about the last time you decided to attend a party. Technically, this is a sentence and not a question, and this asks people to tell a story about an experience that they had in the past. But this works. What was the best part about the last party you attended again? This is a question that draws or has people draw on past experiences? On the other hand, here some questions that are about hypothetical experiences. What would you do if or how would you feel if or how might you use this product when asking people hypothetical questions? Keep in mind that what they think they might do might not actually match what they will really dio. Third, keep the questions as neutral as possible. When we ask questions that are clearly biased, those air called leading questions in that they lead people towards answering in a certain way. We want to limit our bias season. We have to make sure that our questions don't suggest that there's a right way to answer. So some sample ways to frame questions fairly neutrally are the following. What are your thoughts about this idea. How would you describe your personality and what are some of your favorite ways to find out about upcoming events and why? On the other hand, here are some questions that are not neutral. These air leading questions Do you think this is a good idea? You're pretty social, right? Would you use this app? These are questions structures we want to avoid. In that, they suggest to the participant that they should answer yes, 1/4 tip for framing qualitative questions, especially in synchronous research. Warrior asking questions in real time is to be ready to ask follow up questions when conducting live research. There aren't often opportune, or there are. There are often opportunities to ask people questions that aren't in the original script or in the original set of questions. So follow up questions often arise based on how someone answer their previous previous question, and they're meant to encourage people to further elaborate and share additional information . A few examples of starters for follow up questions include Can you tell me more about that ? What happened after that and why? But in terms of follow up questions, active listening is really going to be the key to help you create good and natural. Follow up questions when deeply listening to what people share, fall of questions tend to arise, so be sure to pay close attention to what people are saying and try asking follow up questions for further insights. At the same time, Onley ask follow up questions if they seem relevant to the topic, and if they'll help, you better understand the person's perspective. Otherwise, it could be really easy to digress. The first tip for crafting quantitative questions, as opposed to qualitative questions, is to offer choice within structure, including a right and option. So surveys are often used to gather quantitative data, though they can be used to gather qualitative data to. And if we only asked open under questions and surveys, it could take forever to gather Le to analyze large batches of data. So instead, it might be more effective to create constraints like multiple choice options for answers or like right skill options, so that participants can select from a predetermined list of answer options. This will also help to quickly quantify and analyze data, but do make sure to include right and options where appropriate, so that people can choose other. Or they can write in exactly what they want to say in case the options that exist don't work for them. And again, like with qualitative questions, do be sure to ask about concrete experiences over hypothetical ones and to keep questions new stroll as possible. The final tip applies to all kinds of research. Keep the questions central. In other words, Onley. Ask the questions you really need to ask in order to meet your research goals and understand what you need to understand. You're participants. Time is valuable, and so is yours. So spend the time asking only the most important, most relevant questions. Having a really clear sense of the project goals will help, so be sure to spend time understanding and clarifying the scope of the project to begin with to. So those are the tips for crafting some questions, and now it's your turn to give it a try. So here's the challenge. Develop a set of 5 to 10 questions to ask your target audience. Remember that the design topic is to design the perfect party, and you've already defined your target audience that you're focusing on. I'm excited to see what you come up with, and I hope that you share your questions in the class community up next, we'll talk about a few other considerations before asking questions. See you there. 5. Important considerations for framing questions: in this video, we're gonna talk about a couple of key considerations for asking questions, in particular will talk about adding introductions and conclusions. When we engage people with questions, we'll also talk about note taking. So let's get started before asking questions. Regardless of format. It's important to always include clear introduction so that participants fully understand what's about to happen. Even if you asking questions informally, it's a good idea to explain people why you're asking them questions. It's key to build, trust and report with participants right off the bat so that participants are comfortable working with you. Breaking the ice can be key for participants to feel open enough to share their thoughts and opinions. And I try to do this by framing interactions Maura's conversations than his interviews and by trying to carry a friendly, casual tone throughout the entire process so that engagement feels natural. Another main point to consider when framing your introduction is to be transparent about the purpose of the questions and how the responses your collecting will be used by answering questions. Participants are basically collaborating and partnering with you in your design process, and it's crucial to make sure that they know why they're ants. Insights are being collected and how their insights will be used. Offer an estimated duration of the process to so that people know how long the survey, interview or focus group might take. Additionally, it's important for you to clarify whether or not their data will be anonymous or confidential or both. If you're productive and anonymity and confidentiality, be clear about how you're gonna do so, whether that's through destroying data. D identifying with pseudonyms or other means. And if you are not going to be able to protect in anonymity or confidentiality, be sure to clarify that and remind participants that they can opt out. Do you always ask for consent and let participants know that they can opt out at any time? If at any point participants aren't comfortable with the purpose of the research or how the data will be used, you have to let them not participate or to opt out of participating. Be clear and ask for consent before asking questions before taking notes before recording information before taking any photo, audio or video and so on, make sure that participants know exactly what's happening before the process of asking questions of begins and be sure to give participants ample opportunity to ask any questions before the start. So here are some samples, sentence starters and questions to consider using one developing your introduction. You might say the purpose of this interview is to find out the responses you share will help us to. The responses you share will be confidential, especially if they will be confidential. And if they won't explain why they won't be confidential, you can skip many questions you don't want to answer. Do you consent to participate in this and explain what they're participating in? Do you have any questions before we begin? After asking questions, Let's talk or let's talk about the conclusion so asking. After asking questions, be sure to give participants another chance to ask any questions that they might have thanked them for their participation and explain what happens after the research is done. Offer a way for participants to follow up with you if they have any questions after the engagement, too. So here are some sentence starters and questions to consider using as you wrap up. Thank you for your time. Your perspectives will help us by Do you have any questions before we wrap up? If you have any questions about this afterwards, you can reach us at. So in addition to including a clear introduction and conclusion, it's important to think about how you're going to take notes, decide the method you will use to take notes and be sure to get consent. If you're conducting surveys, there might not be really notes to take, especially if participants are taking the surveys on their own time. But if you're moderating, moderating the research through a method like interviews or focus groups, you'll likely want to take notes during the engagement, so long as participants consent to it. If that's the case, be sure to have your note taking tools readily available. Whether that's pen and paper, a tablet laptop and just jot down what you can as participants share. If you're also observing the interactions, write down any key observations you make, which might include questions, patterns, contradictions or tensions. Sometimes you might be in situations where it wouldn't be appropriate or possible to take notes, and in those instances, do your best to remember what you can during the interaction and then write down notes as soon as you can after the engagement ends, while the engagement and content are still fresh in your memory, if recording audio or video, it's also a good idea to review the material shortly after the engagement in transcribe the data and to add any additional notes and observations. While audio and video recordings can be more complete ways to capture information that people share note that transcriptions can also be very time sensitive. So your next step is in the class project is to add an introduction and a conclusion to the question set that you previously developed. You're basically developing an interview guide or a full survey. Consider the points that we discussed in this video as you create an ad, your introduction and your conclusion. And now that you have a solid set of questions complete with this intro and conclusion, it's time to go. Ask the questions. Give it a try. Find people in your target audience in invite willing participants to answer your set of questions. Maybe you conduct interviews or focus groups, or you create and distribute a survey. The method is up to you and then you'll gather your notes, which will use and talk about in the next steps. In the next video, we'll talk about what happens after research and synthesizing the findings. So good luck with your research. Go ask some questions and see you on the other side. 6. Synthesizing findings: So here we are. We're almost at the end. You've drafted your set of questions, and maybe you've even asked your questions and collected some insights. So now let's talk about what happens after the research and what we do with all of the information we've gathered with our questions. Let's get started. One next step after conducting research is to analyze the information by identifying patterns. A common method for doing so is called affinity, diagramming or affinity wrapping. When I do affinity diagramming, I pull out key data points and patterns for my research notes, writing each keys piece of information on its own sticky note. Put all the sticky notes on a wall and then cluster the notes and similar groupings to form themes. So it's a very tactile in hands on process. This could be a helpful way to begin to identify trends and priority priority areas that stem from the research. After analyzing and identifying patterns, it's common to present the key research findings and recommendations, especially to project stakeholders. This can take a number of different formats. When I present research findings, I often create reports or slide decks to re highlight the process the major findings and recommendations of how to use research to inform next steps in design strategy. This may also be where we define a clear problem statement and sharpen the focus of a given design challenge. Another stuff after synthesizing findings is to begin idea eating and prototyping. Ideation is the process of generating ideas or concepts to address some of the challenges of problems that we identify through research. Prototyping is an extension of ideation. It's where we begin to build out the concepts generated an ideation to create tangible models of the proposed approaches. We often use craft supplies and other low fidelity materials to create visual representations of approaches and then work our way up to higher Fidelity versions that more realistically represent the approaches through the process of testing and iterating or improving our ideas. And finally, we may find that we need to ask more questions. Research is really an ongoing part of design, and it should never end. We may conduct a round of research and ask our target audience a set of questions and ultimately find that we need more information. In those cases, we revisit the research by developing another set of questions, recruiting more participants and conducting more research, asking more questions. So here's the last part of the class project, particularly for those who were able to complete the bonus challenge of actually conducting research and asking questions with target audiences about designing the perfect party. If you did do that research and ask those questions, share some of your findings from your research. What did you learn? What stood out? How are you going to use what you gather to design the perfect party? And if you could do this over again, what would you do differently? Share your ideas of the class community In our last video. We're gonna wrap up the skill short course of the recap and some final tips for asking questions. See you there. 7. Wrapping up: all right, so we made it to the end of the class. Congratulations. So in this class, we talked about why questions matter, having defining your target audience, how to craft and frame questions, how to take notes, had actually ask the questions and had a synthesized finding. So we've covered a lot of ground, and I hope that this contact really support you as you continue on and ask questions in your own work and in your own life. So I wanted to wrap it with a few key considerations that you can take on with you as you continue to ask questions. So one. Make sure that you remember that there's no one right a wrong way to ask questions. And one method that works in one scenario or one project might not work well for another. So just be careful. Or keep in mind that there are many ways to go about asking questions and see what fits best for the specific context that you're working in. Number two People who are answering the questions for you are like collaborators like people who are partnering with you on the projects that you treat them with utmost respect . and make sure that you are keeping them informed and in the loop about exactly what is happening, what they're agreeing to do as they answer questions for you and do keep in mind to minimize the biases and assumptions that we bring into design and decision making and into the questions that we ask. Power is everywhere and think about how the power that you might have shows up in close spaces, that you're part of how it shows up in impacts, the decision making processes or the question asking and research processes that you're part of. So really be mindful to name the biases assumptions that might be in place so that we can work with them and to minimize them as you design and as you ask questions. So that's really it. Hope you that you keep in touch and keep connected in the class community. Let us know if you're running in 10 challenges as you ask questions, or let us know the questions that you have about asking questions and let us know what's working really well on what success is that you're going through. So I'm really excited to continue to see all of the class projects that you've done and to see what else you do with respect to asking questions and wish you the best of luck as you continue on your endeavours of design, design research in asking questions. So thanks again for joining me in this class. I'd also love to hear any feedback that you have about this class. What you like. What, you didn't like what we could do better. And yes. See you around. One still share. Thanks.