How To Improve Product Research With Deep Listening Practices

Melissa Tullio

February 25, 2025

Designing products for people is tough, especially in the public sector. Services provided by governments need to be accessible to a diverse range of people from different backgrounds, with different skills and abilities, and in different contexts.

Design research is a set of methods and practices that I use often in my work with governments as a Senior UX Designer at Code for Canada. Using these methods can help ensure the products governments build work more efficiently for the people who depend on them.

I’ve been taking a course on deep listening practices, taught in Indi Young’s self-paced course, Listening Deeply, to expand my design research toolkit. In this article, I’ll share what I’ve been learning, so that other design researchers and product delivery teams can consider including these approaches in their practices.

The lessons I’m learning apply not just to public sector service delivery, but to anyone whose job is to deliver better products and services to people.

Why deep listening?

When designing things for people, product designers can sometimes fall into a trap. We are often asked to deliver products in a way that fails to identify and test key assumptions we’re making about the people who use our products. This can cause people real-life harm, ranging from mild to more serious impacts.

Product designers make bad assumptions when we rely too much on product-centric framing. We forget that people who use our products are not using them in a vacuum: in fact, people have many different ways of achieving their purpose, and our product is just one.

Deep listening is a way to broaden how product designers and researchers think about the people who use their products. By taking time to understand peoples’ contexts, not just how they interact with a product, we’re less likely to design something that could cause harm.

What’s involved in deep listening?

Deep listening practices are called “listening sessions.” This is the first step in reframing how product designers think about design research: it’s not an interview, it’s an opportunity to listen to the person in front of us. The primary role of a product designer or researcher is to listen attentively – that’s it!

To prepare for a listening session, invite people who have the same, common purpose to spend some time sharing memories and experiences related to that purpose.

Depending on how well you know the people who use your products, you may frame the purpose more narrowly or broadly. For a broader listening session, you should expect a longer timeframe and multiple rounds of sessions to get to know people’s purpose well.

Next, create something called a "germinal question" to kick off each of the listening sessions. A germinal question is focused on a person’s purpose or goal, and the specific memories and ways of thinking they have related to that purpose. The rest of the conversation flows naturally from this question, with few interruptions from the listener.

Here’s an example of how a listening session might be set up:

Study: A shop wants to understand how to increase sales on its website.
Common purpose: Do all my holiday shopping quickly to avoid feeling stressed.
Germinal question: Tell me what went through your mind as you prepared for holiday shopping last year.

After starting the session with the germinal question, the role of the listener is to follow the conversation from topic to topic and encourage people to access specific memories. We do not create a script or set of questions to ask; we do not probe or try to anticipate the next thing to talk about.

I’ll be honest, this approach is both liberating and terrifying at first – as someone who’s been doing some version of in-depth interviewing for a long time, diving in without research questions and an interview guide feels like cliff diving!

But the results are better. The conversations focus on topics that are most important to people, rather than what the researcher thinks might be important. The techniques taught in the course ensure we’re accessing people’s specific memories and experiences, which provides more dependable, valid data.

By taking this approach, we can ultimately gain a deeper understanding of where the opportunities lie to design better products for people.

Don’t forget sensemaking!

Listening sessions produce lots of different qualitative data points, including:

Different topics that relate to the germinal question and the purpose that people are trying to achieve.
Different ideas within a topic that people think about as they’re sharing a memory.
Different layers of meaning behind each topic – from more superficial descriptions to deeper memories and ways of thinking.

After the session is over, it’s important to break down each conversation and find patterns: this process is called sensemaking. The patterns that emerge from deep listening are called thinking styles: the common approaches that people take to achieve their purpose.

Sensemaking takes time, and it’s critical to make space for it. After all, the thinking styles that emerge from this approach are what a product design team will use to improve products, so it’s worth getting it right.

Build better products by listening deeply

By practicing deep listening, product designers can gain a better understanding of people who use their products, and opportunities to help them achieve their purpose.

The heart of this approach is about finding people with a common purpose, listening attentively to the ways they think about achieving their purpose and taking the time to find patterns across each listening session.

I’d encourage any product designer or delivery team to take a look at Indi’s course and make time to practice better listening and sensemaking when doing research with people.

By including this approach in our design research toolkits, we can open up new opportunities to design things better for a diverse range of people.