Follow-up questions and past behaviour — Examples

Example 1 — A hypothetical redirected to the last time

A participant answers with what they would probably do. The interviewer had a leading question queued next. Show that question beside its rewritten past-behaviour version, so the session returns to an actual episode.

Participant: "I'd probably just export it."
Queued next: "Would that be easy for you?"

Solution

Instead:     "When did you last need to get this data out?"
Participant: "Monday — I copied it into a spreadsheet by hand."
Follow-up:   "How long did that take?"
Participant: "About forty minutes, twice, because it lost my changes."

The queued question is leading and hypothetical, so it invites agreement and produces no step, tool or number. Redirecting to the last time recovers the workaround and the cost in the participant’s own units. The usual mistake is accepting a sentence about the future as a finding, which leaves the session full of idealised users who behave nothing like the person in front of you.

Example 2 — Asking for the verb, and keeping their words

A participant describes the process in adjectives. Rewrite the follow-ups so they chase what actually happened, and collect the phrasing the product does not use.

Participant: "The reorder process is frustrating and slow."
Follow-ups:  1. "Why is it frustrating?"  2. "Why is it slow?"

Solution

Participant: "The reorder process is frustrating."
Interviewer: "What did you do at the point it got frustrating?"
Participant: "It kept losing my changes, so I retyped the whole list."

Verbatim notes
"losing my changes"   the product calls this "unsaved draft"
"retyped the list"    the product calls this "bulk edit"

The rewritten follow-up asks for the action at the moment of frustration, which yields the screen, the step and the workaround. Asking “why” twice in a row invites invented reasons, and the participant’s own words are the finding worth quoting to the team later. The usual mistake is summarising their answer back to them, which replaces their phrasing with yours.