97 Things Every UX Practitioner Should Know

Chapter 95. Ask Participants to Tell You What You Don’t Know to Ask

Amanda Rotondo

You’ve done stakeholder research, read your background materials, and composed your masterfully symphonic interview guide. You’re ready to excavate the entirety of your topic area, gather the knowledge necessary to trudge across the wasteland of the unknown, and forge a miracle for your desperate and painfully grateful end user.

Except that, in the last 15 seconds of your research, your participant drops a bomb as delicate as a silken-robed piranha, and you are left standing cold and alone in a frozen tundra, faced with what you didn’t know that you didn’t know.

In medicine, it’s called the doorknob question. It’s when, halfway out the door, a patient asks their doctor a question that adds a layer of complexity and urgency to their until-now mundane conversation: “Oh, should I worry that I’ve been fainting several times a day?”

What???

The doctor’s question here might be “How could you not have told me this?” Meanwhile, the patient’s response is “How could you not have asked?” For us, the researcher is the doctor, and the participant is the patient.

Most often, your background work and thoughtful questions will have hedged against any surprise revelations. But what a researcher stands to lose is greater than the job of adding one easy question to the end of each session:

“Is there anything I haven’t ...