In helping a colleague prepare for a usability test, I found Jared Spool’s latest UIE Tips article timely and totally in synch with my own experience. Three questions NOT to ask during user research (paraphrased and embellished):

• Don’t ask about the future. People don’t know what they would really do in hypothetical scenarios—even highly realistic ones.
• Don’t ask how they’d design a feature. They either won’t know or won’t have good rationale. They know their process and to a degree they know their problems—focus on that, not their proposed solutions.
• Don’t provide a (supposed) answer to your own question (“Did you do X because Y?”). Leading questions may be a staple of political pollsters, but they yield biased results. Don’t feed them reasons out of your own experience or assumptions—let them provide their own.

Thanks Jared—good reminders.