Carly Buxton, PhD

Ask my 6-year-old daughter for her “favorite color,” and you’ll hear a quick response: pink. Ask what she wants to be when she grows up, and the answer will come just as quickly: a pre-school teacher.

Ok, a couple glimmers of insight. But what are you missing from her story when you phrase your questions this way and keep moving along in the conversation?

You’re missing that her second favorite color is brown. (Yes, brown). And you’re missing that she’s also considering becoming a scientist when she grows up. So, in short, you’re missing a lot about her multifaceted interests and personality—and a lot of potential opportunities for follow-up questions and unexpected avenues of conversation.

I’m here today to make a case against superlatives in user research. Against any answer that anticipates a nicely packaged, singular choice of a response.

This goes against some of the UX research advice I trusted as Biblical for many years. As YC Partner Eric Migicovsky taught me to do, in many a user interview I asked my subject: What is the hardest part about doing [x-thing that you’re trying to solve]? This isn’t necessarily a bad question, and I’ve certainly gained useful insights by asking it. And yet, I’ve eliminated it in recent years. Why?

Well, first of all, because asking for the [blank]-est anything puts undue pressure on the interview subject, whether it’s 46-year-old user a 6-year-old kid. You can see them shifting in their seat as they weigh their options. Not only are they thinking of what answer their interviewer might be expecting (which is something I talk a lot about solving for in UX, but that’s a post for another day), but they’re also weighing pro’s and con’s of various potential ways they could answer your question—and we’re missing that valuable internal monologue entirely! When we ask for the “one” answer, we’re forcibly vanishing all of those delicious second, third, and fourth possible answers we might otherwise have heard.

Another reason I’ve dropped superlatives from my interview guide vocabulary is that the answers to the questions too often tend to be rehearsed. My daughter’s been asked about her favorite color regularly for as long as she could talk. If someone gives the same “story” or answer over and over again, how meaningful is it, really? It becomes more narrative trope than genuine nugget of truth. For instance, if someone always cites ‘work-life balance’ as the biggest challenge in working motherhood, you may be playing into an existing script in their life and thereby missing nuanced details about their specific situation.

The shift I’m advocating is a subtle one, and it involves the insertion of a single phrase: “some of the…” What are some of the hardest things about being the room mom? What are some of the careers you’re considering after college? You might get the rehearsed answer first, but you’ve left the door open for the unrehearsed one, too. And the subject feels much less pressure to choose their answer (and how they phrase it) and can instead feel more comfortable sharing the back and forth of their internal monologue, which is much more valuable to you as a researcher.So the takeaway here: audit the open-ended questions in your existing surveys and interview guides. Look for the instances where you’ve used the superlative case, or where you’ve asked for a singular selection of an answer—but given a blank text box as opposed to limited choices. Heck, I advocate for this even in closed-option survey questions. Reformat to the “select multiple” box rather than the radial, even when you’re putting forth the options. Because trust me, as a user researcher, it can be truly enlightening to hear about #2 and beyond—those unfiltered, unrehearsed insights that reveal the full complexity of a user’s experiences and perspectives.