When you get down to it, that’s what we do as user researchers: We gather information about users in order to inform critical decisions about design, product, or other parts of the business or organization. To do this means that we go to people’s homes, their offices, wherever their context is. We ask what they do. We ask them to show us. We get stories and long answers where we don’t always know what the point is. We want them to explain everything about their world to us. People may not have a ready answer as to why they do something, but we have to listen for why. We have to ask follow-up questions and probe and infer to try to understand, for ourselves, just why something is happening the way it is. We make sense of this disparate information and show the way to act on what we’ve learned.