THE HEURISTIC QUESTION
by Yasushi Kusume
‘Heuristics are rules of thumb for reasoning, a simplification, or educated guess that reduces or limits the search for solutions in domains that are difficult and poorly understood.’
Heuristics and heuristic evaluation, Rikke Friis Dam, The Interaction Design Foundation, September 2013
So what is a ‘heuristic’ question? It’s probably best explained by Daniel Kahneman in his book, Thinking Fast and Slow. He notes that when people can't come up with a satisfactory answer to a challenging question quickly, they tend to replace it with a question they find easier to answer.
Answering the abstract
This, Kahneman believes, helps us find adequate - though often imperfect - answers to difficult questions. It’s how we generate automatic and intuitive views on even the most complex issues, and to illustrate it he describes how a group of German students reacted to a survey about happiness.
Faced with such queries as ‘How happy are you?’ the students had trouble answering. The question was too abstract. So they looked for a question they could answer; in this case, how many dates they’d been on in the previous two months. That, for them, was a much better way to gauge how they were feeling about life.
Look for the heuristic
I bring this up because I believe it’s essential to realise that if you ask an abstract question – such as How happy are you with this brand? – you will very likely prompt people to think of related (heuristic) questions they find easier to answer. This is all right. Sometimes you have to. But, and this is the critical point, avoid a query that doesn’t lead to a list of heuristic questions.
Consider this NPS question, probably the most well-known and cleverly formulated query of any consumer survey: ‘On a scale of 0 to 10, how likely are you to recommend our business to a friend or colleague?’ It’s not a hard question to answer. It avoids such specifics as How do you rate the product, or the after sales support, or the retail experience. Yet at the same time, and this is what I find so impressive about it, it prompts people to think about their whole experience of the business. It opens the door to questions about specifics.
The questions behind the question
Simply put, heuristic questions are often the reason for the targeted question. They lead to the really helpful, specific feelings about a product or a service. So when you compose that targeted query, make sure you also know the other questions it’s going to prompt.
And be ready for them.