2learn

Follow-up questions and past behaviour

What it is

Follow-up questions are what turn an answer into evidence. The script gets you to the topic; the follow-up gets you to the specific. The discipline is to keep asking about what happened, what they did and what they tried, and to treat every sentence about the future as a signal to redirect.

Why it matters

People are poor predictors of their own behaviour. Asked what they would do with a new feature, they describe an idealised user who is not them; asked what they did the last time, they describe the actual workaround with the sticky note on the monitor. Interviews are valuable precisely because they can reach the latter, and they reach it only if the interviewer notices the moment the tense changes.

Core ideas

The five follow-ups

Keep these ready; they fit almost any answer and cost nothing.

1 "Tell me more about that."
2 "What happened next?"
3 "What did you do then?"
4 "How did you work that out?"
5 "Why was that?" — once, never twice in a row

Chase the verb, not the adjective

“Frustrating” tells you nothing; “it kept losing my changes” tells you what broke. Ask what they did at the moment of frustration and you get the step, the screen and the workaround.

Redirect the future back to the past

When someone says “I would probably…”, ask when they last did something like that. The redirect must be gentle and immediate, or the rest of the session stays in the hypothetical.

Participant: "I'd probably just export it."
Interviewer:  "When did you last need to get this data out?"
Participant:  "Monday — I copied it into a spreadsheet by hand."

Ask about the cost, in their units

Minutes, phone calls, re-typing, a colleague’s time — get the units the person actually counts in. “How long did that take?” converts an annoyance into a number the team can rank.

Note the exact words

Write the participant’s phrasing verbatim when it differs from the product’s. Those mismatches are the findings, and they are the lines worth quoting to the team later.

Practice

Practise the future-to-past redirect

In your next three sessions, mark every sentence your participant says about the future, and write down the redirect you used and the answer it produced.

Done when: you can show one redirect that recovered a concrete episode after a hypothetical answer.

Run an interview with follow-ups only

Take an answer from a previous session and write five follow-ups to it that never change the topic. Then use one of them live and note what it produced.

Done when: one follow-up has produced a detail — a step, a tool or a number — that the original answer did not contain.

Common mistakes

  • Accepting a hypothetical — “I would use it daily” is treated as a finding; fix: redirect to the last time the situation actually occurred.
  • Asking “why” repeatedly — people invent reasons to satisfy the questioner; fix: ask “what happened” and let the reason emerge from the sequence.
  • Summarising their answer back to them — you replace their words with yours and lose the quote; fix: write down their phrasing and stay quiet.
  • Agreeing with their complaint — they learn what you want to hear and supply more of it; fix: acknowledge neutrally and ask what they did next.
  • Chasing a tangent because it is interesting — the session drifts off the question it was recruited for; fix: park the tangent in your notes and return to the script.

Go deeper

Worked examples

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