User Research Questions

Product Management User Experience

Now we can start from a better foundation with AI Assistants.

Writing user research questions is one of the most effective ways I have used the application as a starting method. You can save time by quickly generating well-crafted questions without spending hours, thanks to vast amount of training data each AI Assistant has at its disposal.

AI Assistants also align with best practices in user research. Participants can avoid common pitfalls and biases, resulting in better information and more targeted questions. The truth is that when you use AI, there’s always going to be some bias, but that’s correctable with a human reviewing the draft.

It may feel like having another seasoned UX professional on hand, ready to help you craft questions that get to the heart of user needs and behaviors, all while saving you precious time.

Most of the teams I have managed shared research duties with product managers. This was always time-consuming and lacked alignment. Now, not so much.

These are tips for writing the prompts. Most of this is focused on B2B, but you can adjust it for B2C by changing the focus.

Start with the Domain

Begin by declaring the category you want to research or the areas you want to compare across competitors. I recommend starting with a specific category.

It’s a good idea to set the context of your research so that you can refine it with deeper analysis and track your journey. You can specify any context, including the number of results or the display format.

We’ll start with our example: customer relationship management systems.

Prompt

Create 10 user research questions about customer relationship management systems.

Add Features

Focusing on specific features allows you to dig deeper into the user’s actual experiences and pain points. This will uncover detailed insights about what works well and what doesn’t, which helps with prioritization and pattern matching on specific needs.

This approach also helps you gather precise feedback rather than broad, generalized opinions. Ultimately, it leads to a more user-centered product development process.

Asking very general questions for larger systems is too broad, especially if you already have a system in place. Let’s focus on one goal for the feature set: managing multiple accounts. This is a typical use case for customer relationship management.

Prompt

Create 10 user research questions about managing multiple accounts using customer relationship management systems.

Add User Personas

Now let’s take another step — adding a user persona.

Proto-personas, or user personas based on existing knowledge or best guesses, ensure that your questions are targeted and relevant, uncovering insights that might be overlooked with a generic approach of looking at all users in the system.

By tailoring questions to specific user personas, you can gather more actionable feedback during user interviews because you’re suggesting a specific role when using the application.

For the record, I’m calling them user personas intentionally because they don’t take the place of talking to users; they just help formulate questions you may want to ask so you can refine them. You can upload a user persona from our list of users that we focus on. I won’t cover this during this tutorial, but it is something you can play with at this point to inform your questions.

We’ll add a business development representative for this example.

Prompt

Create 10 user research questions about managing multiple accounts as a business development representative using customer relationship management systems.

Add Goals

Focusing on a specific user persona with a specific goal is even better because it ensures the insights gathered are deeply relevant to specific tasks the user may need to complete.

The more specific you get about the request, the more it helps narrow down the questions. Honing in can uncover nuanced and specific pain points that might otherwise be overlooked.

However, sometimes you don’t want to get too specific because you want to explore. I like keeping it open myself because then it might catch something I missed, and it’s a great way to learn how to craft better prompts.

We’ll add a business development representative managing multiple accounts.

Prompt

Create 10 user research questions about managing multiple accounts as a business development representative focusing on generating more qualified leads using customer relationship management systems.

Test the Questions

This doesn’t replace user testing, but it gives a bit of a sniff test to see if the questions make sense. This is crucial because it helps ensure clarity and comprehensibility for participants. Provide context and detail, making the questions easier to understand and answer accurately.

This can reveal potential ambiguities, leading to improved question design.

To review the answers after the questions, use the answers prompt right after the questions prompt., if you edit the draft questions, you also can paste them back in and ask for the answers using a different prompt.

Sample Questions Prompt

Create 10 user research questions about managing multiple accounts as a business development representative focusing on generating more qualified leads using customer relationship management systems. Give three detailed examples of answers to each question.

Sample Answers Prompt

Create three sample answers about managing multiple accounts as a business development representative focusing on generating more qualified leads using customer relationship management systems from the entered content.