“Where do you normally do this?”

From Erika Hall · Co-founder of Mule Design; author of Just Enough Research

Why it works

Hall's central rule in Just Enough Research is to conduct research in the natural context of the topic you're studying, because people unconsciously edit out the parts of their environment that shape their behaviour — the meeting that interrupts the task, the second monitor, the kitchen-table laptop, the colleague over the shoulder. 'Where do you normally do this?' is the cheapest version of contextual inquiry: it forces them to picture a specific place, which drags along the tools they actually use, the people they actually loop in, and the interruptions you would otherwise design around as if they didn't exist. The answer is rarely the headline; the headline is everything that comes after, once the place is fixed.

When to ask

Early in an interview, once the person has named the activity but before they describe it in detail. Reach for it whenever you catch yourself imagining a clean desktop scenario — the real environment is almost always noisier, more interrupted, and shared with someone you didn't account for.

Good follow-ups

Walk me through the last time you did it there — what was on the screen, what else was going on?
Who else is usually around, or do you tend to be alone when this happens?
Is there anywhere you've tried to do this and it didn't work — what got in the way?

Watch out for

Accepting 'at my desk' and moving on. That's a label, not a setting — push for the room, the screens, the time of day, who else is around. The opposite failure is treating the answer as the finding; the value is what the place reveals about constraints (a shared screen, a bad signal, a one-monitor laptop) that change which solutions are even plausible. If you can, follow up with an actual visit or a screen-share — Hall's stronger claim is that observation beats self-report every time.

Where to ask

User interviewgreat
Native habitat — the answer is half-context and half-permission to keep going ('show me where, then walk me through it'); a live interviewer can pivot the conversation into an actual contextual visit.
Sales callworkable
Workable in discovery — buyers describing where the work happens often surface the org-chart, the tool stack, and who else gets pulled in — but you cannot follow them to the desk, so corroborate with later artefacts.
In-product surveypoor
A location is rarely answerable in one async field without losing the texture that makes it useful; narrow it to one concrete place so a single line can still carry evidence.
Reworded for this context: “Where were you the last time you did this — at a desk, on the move, somewhere else?”
Long-form surveypoor
Hall's whole point is that context is something you observe, not something you ask about; a survey trades the observation for self-report, which is exactly what she warns against.

Stage: Consider · A question popularized by Erika Hall

Source: https://medium.com/research-things/interviewing-humans-fa198f809c40