Asking questions is hard.
Getting useful answers from people is even harder.
I had never considered how hard coming up with a good question is. I mean I ask questions everyday. You can ask questions about anything: What’s your favorite color? Where do you want to go for lunch? What’s an appropriate statistical test to run on the data we acquired so we can actually draw a conclusion from this data we spent weeks collecting? But coming up with a good question is much more difficult.
First of all you have to figure out what you really are interested in learning about. Is it really that we want to know what vitals are being monitored electronically in the PICU or rather what the routine of the nurses is as they work with this system and where it fails? Some of these things may sound similar, but slight changes in phrasing lead to very different answers. This was a confusing thing to figure out. We wanted to go into clinic to get answers from people that knew what they were talking about and would be able to help us answer the many questions we thought we had. But actually going into clinic and talking to professionals was a little intimidating. I made up a list of almost 40 questions, but it seemed like we went through them in less than 10 minutes and we hadn’t learned anything at all.
So then I tried to keep asking. We kept being told to try and dig deeper. So I did and I think I got there… eventually. Rephrasing and following up on answers over and over again seemed repetitive to me, but as I kept asking the respondent’s answers seemed to get closer to things that were actually what I was there to be finding out. Other times I would try to follow them down a rabbit hole and it would turn out we were quickly diverging from the helpful information.
As we continued to go back into clinic I got better at this, or I at least felt more comfortable with it. I think the biggest thing is being prepared. Going in having the best idea possible of what you’re trying to find out and having already done some amount of research certainly made it easier to talk to physicians and nurses. This also became easier as we got further along in our project idea. Once our concept had actually materialized it was easier to ask questions around finding out how our device would fit into the current work flow. It also allowed for asking less general questions and more specific things as they pertained specifically to our project.
There seems to be an art to asking really good questions. It’s not easy, but it is possible and it seems that the more you do it the better you will be. The better you become the better answers you will be able to get. This is definitely worth the effort because while it may take more time on the front end, that time would be small compared to the potentially wasted years or decades of working on a project that turns out to not actually be based in a definite need.
BME Design 