#72 - How to Ask Great UX Research Questions with Amy Chess of Amazon

Your research question is where it all begins. It’s what drives your research forward, informs when you’re ready to wrap up your project, and it’s what gets everyone involved on the same page. But how do you know you’re asking the right research questions? 

This week on the podcast, Amy Chess, UX Researcher at Amazon, chatted with Erin and JH about how she chooses which questions to ask in her user research projects.

Amy talked about…

• The difference between research questions, research objectives, and interview questions
• How to ask the right research questions
• Why you can’t pick a methodology before you know your research question
• How building trust with stakeholders can push your research questions further

Highlights

• [1:30] What's the difference between a research question and an interview question?
• [7:38] What comes first? The research question or the methodology? 
• [11:13] How to not to ask bad research questions. 
• [19:07] Go where the research leads you, even if it’s not where you planned to go. 
• [25:53] Structuring user interviews to answer your research questions.
• [36:09] Work with user research before you have it all figured out.

About our guest

Amy Chess is a UX research leader (formerly at Amazon, Walmart) and educator. She specializes in qualitative data collection techniques and the meaningful synthesis of qualitative and quantitative user data. Amy is intensely invested in developing new methodologies to evaluate integration efforts from a UX perspective, promoting the value of UX research amongst stakeholders, and pioneering approaches for UX practitioners, technical teams, and product management to collaborate and partner together.