On an impossibly sunny day in Los Angeles, I sat in a loft in Venice observing a group of twenty-somethings talk about their dating lives. The focus group moderator asked, “Next time you’re single, which app will you use to meet someone?” Not one person mentioned Tinder. How could that be? At the time, Tinder was the largest dating app—by a large margin.
Later in the conversation, the moderator asked, “Have you met anyone on Tinder in the last year?” Nearly everyone raised their hand.
This stark disconnect reveals a fundamental truth about user research: not all questions are created equal.
Some questions lead to the truth, and others lead to wildly inaccurate conclusions.
Product teams invest significant resources into user research with the hope of uncovering insights that will guide product decisions. Yet, too often, we fail to recognize that the nature of our questions dramatically affec…
