Why should we avoid the question why you ask? Well, we already stated in the title that you should avoid asking us why… But seriously, why you should avoid asking “why”. After all, asking why seems to be the most logic way for understanding consumer behaviors. In fact, many inexperienced researchers use this question rapidly. The reasons might be:
1) They want to put pressure on the participants to speed things up.
2) They have limited questions to choose from.
3) Cultural, social and language differences promote simple questions.
In our research on mattresses, we observed our participants choosing and interacting with mattresses. If we asked them the question: why do you sleep in that position? Participant would become aware of their motivations. They might try to imitate common believes about sleep. Not asking why allowed us to discover that sleeping is also a state of mind, part of a ritual at the end of the day.
Asking family members why they chose to hide the router in the closet (seriously, you have no idea how many spiderwebs we have found there), would harm our attempts to gather the real information on how the users interact with technology. We found out that what the engineers regard as smart technology, makes no sense for the users.
So, what you should do to avoid the “why” question? Try asking “why” in a different manner. Here in insightoutsk.com we came up with a much better alternative. Contact us, and we will show you how.
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