When this type of research makes sense
Current behavior research is useful when you want to deeply understand how people handle a specific situation today. You're not validating a problem or exploring broadly. You're mapping a workflow in detail.
This is different from discovery research. In discovery, you're casting a wide net: what problems exist in this space? What matters to these people? Current behavior research goes deeper on one specific workflow. You already know roughly where to look. Now you're trying to understand exactly how it works.
This is particularly valuable when:
- You're designing something that will replace or improve an existing process
- You want to know what triggers someone to act, and what success looks like to them
- You need to understand the full context to build something people will actually adopt
The goal is to see the situation through their eyes, not to confirm what you already believe.
What you're trying to learn
Current behavior interviews help you map the full flow around a situation:
- The trigger: What situation prompts someone to act? What's the "first thought" moment?
- The process: What steps do they take? What tools, people, or workarounds are involved?
- The outcome: What does success look like? How do they know they're done?
- The friction: Where does it break down? What's annoying, slow, or unreliable?
You're building a mental model of how things work today. One that's rich enough to design against.
Why switching is hard
Even when the current way isn't great, people don't switch easily. There's comfort in the familiar. There's the effort of learning something new. There's the risk that the new thing will be worse.
To get someone to change, the frustration with the old way and the appeal of the new way need to outweigh the friction of switching. Understanding that balance helps you design, and position, your solution more effectively.
That's why it's not enough to find pain points. You need to understand how much pain, and what's keeping people stuck despite it.
Common mistakes
Focusing only on tools. "What software do you use?" is a starting point, not the whole picture. The interesting stuff is in the gaps between tools: the manual steps, the copy-pasting, the workarounds.
Asking about ideal workflows. You want to understand what they actually do, not what they think they should do. Ideal-state answers are less useful than messy reality.
Missing the emotional context. Decisions aren't purely rational. Someone might stick with a clunky process because it feels safe, or because they've invested effort in learning it.
A practical example
Say you're exploring how marketing managers handle campaign reporting. You talk to ten of them.
You learn that the trigger is usually a Monday morning meeting. The process involves pulling data from three platforms into a spreadsheet, formatting it, and adding commentary. Success means walking into the meeting with answers ready. The friction is that it takes two hours every week and still feels incomplete.
Now you understand the workflow. You know what "done" looks like. You know where it hurts. That's the foundation you need to design something better.
From workflow to design
After current behavior research, you should have:
- A workflow map: trigger → steps → outcome, including friction points and workarounds
- An understanding of what keeps people stuck in the current way
This becomes your design foundation. You know what your solution needs to fit into, what it needs to be better than, and what "done" looks like to your users.
When sharing with stakeholders, the workflow map is often the most useful artifact. It shows the current reality, and makes the opportunities visible.