The most valuable insights often lie just outside our immediate field of vision.
I recently observed a pattern in user research that got me thinking. When stakeholders, clients etc. come to us with research questions, they typically arrive with a clear, focused set of questions they need answered.
KPIs, qualitative unknowns and what not. Even when they don’t know what questions to ask, clients seem confident they have a scope ready.
These questions are important — they reflect immediate business needs and pressing product decisions. But here’s the thing — if we limit ourselves to only answering what’s explicitly asked, we risk missing the bigger picture.
Consider this scenario: A product team approaches you about understanding how users interact with their notification system. The immediate questions might be:
– Which notifications do users like to interact with the most?
– What is the attitude towards the tone of voice?
– How many notifications are too many?
While these are all valid questions that deserve answers, they miss the bigger picture. By zooming out just slightly, we can transform this tactical research into strategic insights. We might expand our inquiry to explore:
– How do notifications fit into users’ broader daily routines and workflows?
– What makes certain types of information feel urgent versus merely interesting?
– How do users manage information across different platforms and contexts?
I experienced this firsthand while working on a project for a content-heavy health app. The initial brief focused narrowly on search preferences, but by broadening our lens, we uncovered crucial insights about how people manage their health habits throughout the day. These findings not only answered the immediate questions but also informed the product roadmap for the next year.
This approach of “progressive widening” — starting with the immediate question and then expanding the scope —balances out your discussion guides and makes your conversations worthwhile. Using these DGs in user interviews will give you:
1. context that makes your immediate findings more actionable
2. a foundation of understanding that future research can build upon
3. helps identify potential, previously unkown, opportunities and challenges before they become urgent
The key is finding the right balance. You don’t want to expand the scope so much that you lose focus or exceed resources. Instead, think one level up from your immediate questions. If you’re studying a feature, consider the whole product. If you’re studying a product, consider the whole user journey. As user researchers, we should aim to:
– Looking beyond the feature to the product
– Beyond the product to the user’s workflow
– Beyond the workflow to the user’s broader goals and context
This approach requires more upfront planning and potentially more resources. It requires us to question our clients, PMs and bosses. But the payoff is research that remains valuable long after the immediate questions are answered — makes it worth the investment.
Keeping track of such a broad range of insights can get messy quickly, especially when research is scattered across different teams and projects. This was actually one of the main reasons I built Leapfrog — to create a central home for all our user interviews and research data that teams could tap into over time.
When your research lives in one place, those broader patterns start emerging naturally, even across projects that seemed unrelated at first. Having an AI help connect these dots is nice, but the real value comes from building that lasting knowledge base that teams can learn from months or even years later. But whether you use tools or sticky notes, what matters is having a way to step back and see those wider patterns.
Because in the end, great research isn’t just about answering today’s questions — it’s about finding your next design opportunities.
Thanks to Gregg Bernstein for giving me this insight
Looking beyond: Balancing research scope for long-term research impact was originally published in UX Planet on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.