YOU'RE PROBABLY DOING USER RESEARCH WRONG

Summary from the TLDR Founders newsletter

Product teams waste resources asking the wrong questions. At a focus group in Venice, users claimed they'd never use Tinder again—yet moments later, nearly everyone admitted meeting someone through the app that year. This contradiction reveals three types of research questions with dramatically different reliability: "What did you do?" questions about past behavior yield trustworthy insights because people accurately remember their actions. "What are you doing?" questions capture unfiltered reactions in real-time, revealing genuine confusion or delight without mental editing. "What would you do?" questions about future behavior are the least reliable, since human imagination is flawed and influenced by virtue signaling, yet most common.