Let curiosity guide UX discovery
There’s no such thing as a stupid question.
If there’s one common thread between my life as a journalist and my life as a content strategy/user experience professional, it’s curiosity.
Curiosity is somewhat about being nosey. You’ve got to follow what you want to know, ask questions, and look under the hood to see what’s going on.
When you’re digging into user experience (UX) discovery, you’ve got to be unafraid to ask questions. Let your nosiness and curiosity run wild with questions that you’ll want to answer to create and design better.
Grab your lasso
The discovery phase of any project is a “drink from the firehouse”-type moment. You’ve got a wealth of information in front of you by way of content inventories, interview notes, data, user feedback, and beyond.
Your eyes spin at all the post-its on your desk, or the files and folders stuffed on your desktop.
Take a breath. Start sifting through what you’ve gathered and putting them into groups. I call this my “lasso” phase: Putting my arms around everything I have to contain what’s in my grasp to review. In this process I will:
- Group like assets together, in folders when possible
- Create folders on shared drives, like Google and Dropbox, to make my assets accessible for other teammates
- Create a wiki of all the assets I’ve gathered, and their locations or links
- Make copies of data, feedback, or other content I need future access to
- Identify any information I don’t have that I may need
Once I have my inventory of “stuff,” it’s time to start reviewing everything. If time is a factor, start by prioritizing the major assets you need to review or dig into most of all so you can focus your attention on those pieces first.
Gather your questions, detective
With your list of assets, start with the obvious stuff that will be key to your project goals. As a content strategist, this is often the current website.
The great thing about working with clients, whether in an agency or as a consultant, is you can be a neutral third-party when you review the site for the first time. While you’re more savvy than other web users, you can still imagine what completing a task might be like on that website or app in question. And that can lead your curiosity…
Website questions
On the website, I’m going to ask a lot of questions that I’ll need answers to, either from my client or team, or through more sleuthing. At a high level, I’ll start asking questions, even the most obvious kinds:
- Why does this content exist? Why is this content missing?
- What elements of the design are we open to change? What needs to stay the same?
- How much content do we need to create, and who will help us do it?
- What taxonomies exist and how do they work today?
- Has [fill in the blank] been considered as a solution before? If it was declined, why?
- What has stood in the way of making changes like this before?
More often than not, I’ll turn to my client for these questions to see what they can answer for me. As an outsider, there may be historical context as to why things are a certain way, and that’s a great learning moment for everyone.
User feedback history
You don’t always have all the assets you want to make your discovery better. For example, not every project will come loaded with user feedback history. If something like this is missing, it might worth asking more questions so you can inspire user feedback or testing in the future. I may ask:
- Have you done user testing or feedback in the past? Why or why not?
- What types of users would you want feedback from?
- Who could help manage user feedback, if you instituted this in the future?
- What might be holding you/your organization back from asking users for feedback?
- What would you like to learn from user feedback?
- How might user feedback help your team in the future?
User feedback sessions
If you do get a chance to talk to real users, then congratulations. That’s always a treat in any UX project. This is a great chance to dig into what makes them tick when it comes to using whatever you’re designing. The great thing about users is they often compare their experiences across products, and this can unveil a lot of great insight. Try asking:
- What’s your experiencing using [product] like this?
- What is easy about using this [product]?
- What is difficult about using this [product]?
- What would make this experience better for you?
- Do you have any [products] like this that you like better? If so, why?
Content governance questions
As a strategist, I often make recommendations for content governance. It helps to ask some basic questions here to understand how content’s been governed up until now, and what might impede on a governance plan for the future. Most importantly, it helps me lay a groundwork for content governance that will achievable based on these answers. I’ll likely ask:
- Who’s responsible for writing content on your team?
- Who’s responsible for editing content before it’s published?
- How is content refreshed or edited on your site?
- What’s the turnaround time for content updates?
- If someone outside of your team needs to make a content recommendation, how is that request handled?
Google Analytics questions
Some questions might be more for your own interest, and may not face the client or your team. I find myself most often asking questions aloud, alone in my office, when digging through hard data like Google Analytics. I’ll often mutter things like:
- I wonder why the bounce rate is so high in this particular section?
- What keywords are people using to find pages? To get to this site?
- How are their pages ranking on search console, and for what phrases?
- Why are users dropping off on X journey?
- Why isn’t the CTA being tracked? Why is it successful on X page but not on Y page?
Sometimes questions like these, when posed back to your client or internal team, can inspire further necessary research, like user testing or feedback. Other times, they may only be indicators of problems that need fixing. And that’s just fine, too!
Never be afraid to ask questions
I remember being taught at a young age that sometimes asking too many questions can be annoying. While that may be true, it doesn’t mean they don’t deserve to be answered.
When working on anything that may impact the experience for the core audience, asking as many questions as possible can help uncover a great deal of decisions and directions that may not have been considered before. Your questions, your curiosity, may also be the voice of the person who’ll be using the product in the future
Acting as that curious voice is an essential role on any project, and one that only delivers value for the end-users.
Resources for UX discovery
There’s so much more to UX discovery, and plenty of other web pros have written about the best ways to approach this phase of the project. Here are some of my favorite resources:
- The Discovery Phase in UX Projects, Nielsen Norman Group
- How to Find Things to Do in a UX Discovery, UX Magazine
- UX Design Process: Questions for the Discovery Phase of the Project, HolaBrief
- Discover phase: UX activities & research methods to consider, UX Collective
- Guide to UX Research Methods, Toptal
