What is the question?

Apr 2, 2021

Alice: Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?
The Cheshire Cat: That depends a good deal on where you want to get to.
Alice: I don't much care where.
The Cheshire Cat: Then it doesn't much matter which way you go.
Alice: ...So long as I get somewhere.
The Cheshire Cat: Oh, you're sure to do that, if only you walk long enough.”

— Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland

A colleague and I were recently discussing what metrics or measures we should look at to understand how our product was performing. Usage? Engagement? General sentiments? NPS? A challenge the product team encountered was that they had instrumented our product to great detail, and were collecting lots of metrics and quantitative data, but no one was looking at them and no one knew what to look out for.

This struck me as a case of "If you don't know what question you have, any answer works."

Questions are hard

People often assume that the hardest part of design research is executing the research itself. I've generally found this not to be true. Helping people find / frame the questions they really should be asking often seems harder.

How do we ask the right questions in product development? How do we know if the question is right? I am not 100% sure either — but I suspect it stems from the confluence of who we are serving, what needs they have, and what mission this product has. It also stems from the clarity we currently have about all three and the stage of product development we are in. There also seems to be some element of intuition involved, which is what I've personally relied on most of the time. How do we duplicate that intuition, and help more people ask better questions? ¹

Hoarding answers until questions emerge

That said, as the Cheshire Cat says in Alice in Wonderland: "You're sure to do that (get somewhere), if only you walk long enough."

There seems to be criticism against research theater in design circles — doing research for the sake of doing research. At the same time, I wonder if questions can also emerge the more answers we collect? Isn't there a parallel we draw from our own lives? We explore and try various things, most of us aimlessly ², and some of us eventually understand our purpose or meanings through the various explorations or answer-collecting activities we conduct. The more explorations we perform, the more knowledge we have, the more curiosity we have as a result of this knowledge. Isn't this also the basis of insight synthesis — we explore, and discover emergent patterns we would never have thought of asking?

Conclusion?

Our answer to life, the universe and everything is 42. But what is the question? Why is this the question? To what extent do we need to dive into the question? Some questions also seem unanswerable or not useful to me (E.g. What is the meaning to life? ³), but how can we tell?

Thanks to my colleague who triggered these thoughts, and for humbly reminding me I have no answer to anything. 😵