Week 24 - Talking to experts when you’re not an expert 🤓 🥸

You’re never the expert 🙅🏻‍♀️(but sometimes you’re really not)

As a researcher you quickly learn that the best way to get good quality insight is to accept that in any topic the participant  is the expert of their experience, however close you are to it or how much you know about it. It does happen often that you talk with people about things that you might hold more of an expertise on (e.g. digital products) but you should never exercise that advantage, so that the participant feels comfortable to share thoughts and painpoints.  

But what happens when you have to facilitate a discussion about a technical or niche topic you know next to nothing about? When you’re not pretending not to know but you really don’t know. For our slurry project with Defra we spoke with 18 farmers and me being a born and raised city girl I was very far removed from the technicalities of running a farm and more so those of slurry management.

This is not an unlikely situation to be in as a researcher. I have interviewed financial advisors, stock market experts, energy specialists and the list goes on. It’s not an easy feat and, as you can imagine, being a ‘young’ woman made me have to work even harder to convince my participants that it’s worth talking to me for an hour. Here are some tips that I have found helpful.

Admit you’re not an expert ✋

An expert will always be able to sniff out how much you know about the topic you’re discussing. Some of them might actually find it disrespectful if you try to ‘fake it till you make it’. It’s better if you start the discussion by admitting that you’re not an expert on the topic and that you might have ‘silly’ questions or you might need help with understanding specific aspects of their experience. I have found that sets you up for a much better discussion and also relieves the pressure on you to appear as something you’re not.

Set the mood 🕯️

That applies to all discussions, with experts or not, but it does help a lot in this situation too. Take time in the beginning to discuss things that don’t necessarily have to do with the area that you’re exploring (Hobbies and loved ones are always topics people love to talk about). That gives you an opportunity to establish a flow and a comfort level that will allow you to ask those questions and not agitate your interviewee in the process. 

Ask ‘lay person’ questions 🤭

It’s important to be comfortable with asking those ‘silly’ questions. It’s kind of impossible to probe properly and explore topics in depth when you don’t know what a term means if you're missing the context of a comment. Kindly interrupt your conversation to ask them to elaborate or explain. I’ve actually gotten loads of good insight from questions like these because they force people to reflect on topics they consider ‘basic’ or given. There’s typically a lot of juicy insights in these ‘explanations for a lay person’. 

Let some things go 🥴

Accept that there will be things that you don’t fully understand. When it comes to deciding whether or not you should ask them to explain something, think about three things: A. Do I think this is something that closely relates to what I set out to explore? B. Do we have the time to get into the topic during this session? and C. is there someone in my team that can explain later or during the analysis? Which brings me to my last point.

Involve experts from the team 🤝

If you’re working with a team that has experts on the subject, ask them to join the sessions as notetakers or observers. This can help you during the interview, to direct technical questions to them, to iterate on questions that are not working (and you wouldn’t know 😬

) but also during the analysis as you can delegate the more technical aspects of the analysis to them. 

It can be quite intimidating to have these discussions and respecting the imbalance in knowledge is the first and most important step towards a respectful and meaningful discussion. Have a great weekend everyone 🌟

Spyri is Lead User Researcher at Made Tech, based out of our London office.