The 5 whys

The 5 whys is a user research tool that empower us to deep-dive from the initial problem statement and verify whether what we have identified is merely a symptom of the problem or its root cause. Despite this technique may seem quite simple as it consists of asking why 5 times consecutively, it can be quite dauting in practice, it's not easy to transform every answer into a why question and it can feel quite inquisitive and effortful to the subject of the research.

Let's explore an example to see how the technique works. Our problem statement is "Young professionals want to eat healthy but find it hard to do it". As you can gauge from the problem statement, our understanding of the problem is still quite vague and our objective is to find what is the number one problem that stops young professionals from eating healthy.

Question → Answer

1. Why do you find hard to eat healthy? → I always order take away.
2. Why do you always order take away? → My fridge and pantry are often empty
3. Why are your fridge and pantry often empty? → Because I rarely go shopping
4. Why don't you go shopping? → Because it takes too much effort to figure out what to cook everyday
5. Why it takes too much effort to figure out what to cook? → Because I work most of the time and then I am tired so I never end up shopping

Despite this method is called the 5 whys, we might continue to ask why until the answer starts to become a dog biting it's tail. However this method helped us to figure out a lot more context on the problem and led us to understand that before the user identify choosing what to eat a the first pre-requisite to start eating healthy. Based on this new insight our discovery could be focused on how to help users to choose what to eat and ensuring it is healthy, while focusing on efficiency and convenience of making a choice.

The objective of this method is to get as close to the root problem and have a better overview of the requirements in the mind of the user to achieve their ultimate objective.