Where are you from?

My wife and I recently went on a cruise, and we chatted with many other passengers. We asked and answered many questions, like:

• What activities are you doing in the next port?
• Are you enjoying the cruise so far?
• Have you ever been on this cruise line before?
• What is the next cruise you are planning?
• Are you going to the buffet or sit-down for dinner?
• What did you think of last night’s entertainment?

There was one question, though, that my wife and I were asked at least 20 times. The ambiguous question:

“Where are you from?”

How would you answer this question?

Do they want to know where we live currently? That is probably the most relevant, and we can answer it this way. I do not think this is what the question is asking, though. Do they want to know where we lived most of our lives? Where were we born? What country are our grandparents from?

In other words, what is the context?

My wife and I eventually had a standard (and long!) response to this question, including where we currently live, where we lived before, and where we were born. Phew!

Sometimes, a question without context can lead the conversation into exciting and unexpected areas.

When we asked, “Where are you from?”, we usually received a similar type of response, containing where they live now and where they lived before.

Maybe a question like “Where do you live right now?” can be intrusive and limit the conversation, and “Where are you from?” gives the interviewee some flexibility in responding.

David Hay once told me he often starts his data modeling interviews with the question, “What do you do?”

A powerful question like this can let the interviewee talk for a while in a direction they prefer, and eventually, the dialog will lead to more precise follow-up questions. I can see questions like this being good rapport-builders as well.

In eliciting requirements, do you ask questions with limited or no context? If yes, is it purposeful to allow more sharing and less intrusion? Or would providing more direction to the question lead to better results in a shorter time?

We drove to the airport and flew to the cruise terminal. The parking lot at the airport was a new one for us, so I printed out the address of the parking place near the airport:?

Can you find where a poor or missing context might have led to a poor design?

I checked Google Maps and “null” was definitely not part of this parking lot’s address! I wonder how many customers tried to enter the full address, including the null.

I recently finished reading Merrill Albert’s, Crimes Against Data: 101 true crime stories of people abusing and misusing data, and I found her stories of how data causes poor outcomes to hit home with me. It made me more aware that so many of these types of issues are out there. Some make us laugh. Some make us frustrated. Some make us lose time or money. Some lead to negatively impacting lives.

Questions without context can lead to answers and requirements with missing, inconsistent, or incorrect context. I am a big fan of precision, even on cruises!

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