Situation explorer
The situation explorer is a worksheet used during a user interview, structured as a grid with columns laid out along the user's timeline: what came before, where they are now, where they're trying to get to, and what they expect to do once they've gotten there. The interviewer fills out the "where they're trying to get to" column first, because everything else only makes sense once that destination is on the page. The worksheet marks out the territory to cover; specific questions emerge from what the interviewee says inside each column.
Definition
A worksheet for structuring qualitative interviews about a user's transition, organized as a timeline grid anchored sought-state-first.
The timeline-grid structure
Columns sit at positions along the user's timeline — past, present, sought state, what comes after. Within each column, the interviewer explores a region of inquiry: prior states in the past column, the route leading from present toward sought state, completion criteria within sought state itself, what the sought state enables next. The grid lays the transition out as columns so the interview moves between regions rather than marching down a question list.
Why sought state goes first
The interviewer fills the sought state column before any other. Its conditions define the requirement-set that grounds every other region — what counts as "preparation," what counts as an "intermediate step," what counts as a "surprise," all depend on knowing what the user was working toward. Without sought state established first, those regions hang in the air without the requirement-frame they exist in service of producing.
A second consequence runs in the practitioner's favor: sought state is what users have thought about most concretely, making it the easiest column to fill. The discipline of starting there aligns with the path of least resistance for the interviewee, so the structure runs naturally rather than requiring force.
Regions of inquiry
The worksheet supplies regions to explore — sought state, prior states, route, what comes after, completion criteria — without supplying the questions to ask within them. Pre-decided questions defeat the discipline: a numbered list of "what I want to find out" imposes the interviewer's framework on the interviewee's content before the interview has even started. Whatever questions exist should emerge from the natural shape of what the interviewee is describing within whatever region the conversation is currently in.
The worksheet structures the interview; listen, don't talk governs how it's conducted within that structure. Together they produce data carrying the interviewee's framing intact, not the interviewer's framing imposed on it.
Example
A team interviewing a recent customer of their payroll software starts with sought state: what did "payroll complete for the month" look like to her? She describes her picture of completion — everyone paid on the right day, deductions and taxes filed correctly, the books squared away by the 5th of next month so her accountant has what she needs. Those conditions frame every region that follows. Past has a target ("before that picture existed reliably, what was she doing?"). Route has a destination ("what did getting to that picture this month involve?"). What-comes-after has a baseline ("once that picture is in place, what does it enable?"). The interviewer never asked "what are you trying to accomplish" — the sought state column made the answer available, and the rest of the worksheet followed.