The power of open questions

I did my degree in sociology. There, said it. Cue people from the UK of a certain age chorusing “You’ve got an ology? You’ll be a scientist!“.
There are a few things that have served me well as a result of studying this much-maligned subject. The study of culture, for example, has been invaluable in helping to make organisational change happen. And five hours of lectures a week gave me plenty of time to get involved in a whole load of other activities at Loughborough 20 years ago.

One of the most important things that I studied was research methods or, as it might as well be known, the art of asking questions. Traditionally associated with the design of questionnaires and surveys, it is with this academic hat on that I’ve been watching with interest activity on Linked In, and (specifically) their group regarding their own Android app.

I installed the app a couple of weeks ago, and it provides a cut-down set of the functionality offered on the full site. It is in beta, and it is ok.
The developers are using a group on Linked In to gain feedback from pilot users, and here comes the problem… They are asking closed questions about potential new functionality in the form “would you like to have feature x?”. The problem with this approach is that, if you think about it, the vast majority of people will answer a question of that form in the affirmative… what is there to lose? Even if you don’t think you would use a particular feature, you are better having it than not. The developers would be better focusing their time on just developing the things, and making them optional in the App.

I’m not picking on Linked In here (they are just the same as most other IT firms in this regard, and about to make a shit-load of cash no doubt from IPO) – this is a gripe I’ve had for years with the IT industry. We are rubbish at asking the right questions.

Putting aside my sociological hat, this was brought home to me by an electrician called Dave about a decade ago. I had recently installed a home office, and needed to get power sockets installed. From years of working in IT, I had prepared myself for being asked “what do you want?”, and that preparation had led to the answer “four sockets”.

When Dave arrived, his question threw me a bit. What he actually asked was “what do you want to do when you are at your desk?”. A quick summary of activities (using the PC, printing, scanning, charging my mobile, using a desk lamp…) and Dave had got me to provide enough information to show that we needed more sockets than my original (and uneducated) guess. It was a very simple example, but provided an open-question masterclass that had remained with me to this day.

Over the next few years, as the value of “merely” fixing technical problems for people starts to rapidly decline for IT departments, asking people what they are trying to do rather than simply what they want is going to be the key to a future existence. Helping organisations exploit technology isn’t going to be achieved by simplistically asking “do you want one of these”, getting frustrated because “the business doesn’t know what it wants” or simply asking people to reboot…