Lines of questioning — Discovery user research

Point 1 — Understand user needs

Ask:

• Who are the cohorts, and which of them cannot complete this task alone?
• Where did you meet them: their workplace, their home, a contact centre, a third-party advisor? What were you watching them do?
• What did you expect to hear, and what did you hear instead?
• How did you recruit, and who did the screener exclude?
• Which pain is shared, and which pain belongs to only one cohort?
• What do intermediaries (agents, carers, caseworkers, local authority staff) do that the end user never sees?
• Which findings are still hypotheses because you only have one source?

Evidence to request: recruitment criteria, a sample frame, session notes or visit notes, a cohort map with pains against each group, and at least one finding the team did not expect.

Answers that indicate Met: the team can tell a different story for at least two cohorts, from sessions they ran themselves, and they can show how recruitment avoided a convenient sample.

Answers that indicate Not Met:

• research is a survey of staff, or interviews with policy
• one persona stands in for every user
• the team has not spent time with anyone who fails, abandons, or phones for help
• findings repeat the business case they started with

Follow-ups when the pack is thin

• How many of the people you learned from were users, and how many were colleagues describing users?
• What did the contact centre tell you that the digital analytics could not?
• Who is affected by this policy that you have not spoken to, and why?

Do not ask them to usability-test a future service. If they offer a prototype as their research, note it for the design assessor and ask what they know about the current task.