The Question Layer

Early in my career, the CEO I worked for coached me on a lesson I still keep front and center: every one of us is tuned to one radio station. WIIFM. What’s in it for me?

He meant every meeting, every conversation, every presentation, every document review. Big or small. Momentous or mundane. People are always tuned in to themselves. He meant it as pure pragmatism, too. Know that’s where your audience lives, and you become a better communicator and a better experience designer.

And yet.

The world’s experiences are rarely designed for their users. Sure, we had the Design Thinking movement and leadership principles for Customer Obsession. And yet, here we are, skim-reading this piece, then off to sit through an agenda, wade through a deck, scroll through a site map, wander through a store.

Our experiences are built for us to follow. To review. To wait until we know what’s in it for us.

Throughout, each experience made us wait to get our questions answered.

Consider how we have found information for the last century. Library catalogs organized the world by subject. Web directories did the same. Search boxes wanted keywords. Websites wanted us to learn their menus. Events handed us agendas. Sales teams walked us through decks, slide by slide, in their order.

We always arrived carrying our questions. But first, we had to hunt and wait to get the specific answer we wanted.

We have stopped searching and started asking questions

The biggest example of this, and the one training the behavior fastest, is what has happened to online search. We’ve moved from keywords to questions.

The old way: brake grinding noise.

The new way: My brakes are grinding, but only when I slow down. Can I drive on them for a few days, or does the car need to go in now?

Here’s one of mine, from planning a London trip with event days at ExCeL and time at our Opus Agency office in Bermondsey:

The old way: best hotels for London business travel.

The new way: Where should I stay in London if my days are at ExCeL, my evenings are near London Bridge, and I need somewhere quiet enough to get work done at night?

The old search box wanted a topic. Now I can share the whole situation: the context, the constraints, the follow-ups, and the decision I actually need to make.

AI Mode invites people to ask whatever is on their mind, in full detail, then keep going with follow-up questions that carry the context forward. Under the hood, Google calls the technique query fan-out: one question gets broken into subtopics and searched simultaneously, on our behalf.

For most of us, Google is a habit: the first move in figuring out almost anything. Google is still the front door to the internet for billions of people. When Google changes how we all start, that change spreads everywhere.

This will only matter more as voice becomes the default interface across our devices. The new Siri, Gemini, Claude, and ChatGPT are all building for it, and Microsoft’s Windows 2030 vision imagines a computer that barely needs a keyboard. We’re coming to the end of typing.

We will carry this expectation everywhere

We have been prepped for this for years. Feeds, streams, and recommendation engines taught us that things should show up already tailored to us. Sure, people still love defaults, and people still follow the crowd, but now the crowd expects everything to feel personal.

So the question-first habit will travel well beyond the browser tab.

Once you start with your own question, you carry that expectation everywhere: the museum, the hotel, the classroom, the doctor’s office. We will expect every experience to be immediately answerable.

Think about the mechanic’s shop, where the real questions were always bigger than the repair itself. Is this urgent? Can it wait two weeks? What’s the cheapest safe option? What would you do if this were your car?

Or the sales meeting, where the buyer sits through the deck while needing the answers the presenter saves for the end. What would this cost us? Where does this fail? Who, like us, has done this before?

My teams live this one at Opus Agency. We produce events of all shapes and sizes for world-shaping brands. These are authored experiences in their purest form: a keynote filled with stories, an agenda that unfolds a “curated” attendee journey, and an environment designed to carry an audience through it.

And yet, those very same audiences are being trained, every day, by every question box in their lives, to expect a way in on their own terms. A keynote attendee already wants to ask, mid-session: What did they just announce? How does it compare to last year? What should I bring back to my team on Monday?

Every experience needs two paths

The first is the authored path: 
the keynote, the campaign, the demo, the doctor’s advice, the brand narrative.

This path still matters, and it matters more than ever.

People want guidance. They want expertise and curation. They want someone with taste and judgment to say: here is the story, and here is what matters.

The second is the question path.

This is the layer that lets people ask their way in and ask their way through.

What does this mean for my role? What did I miss? What’s the risk? Can you explain it like I know nothing? What should I do next?

The question path is what people take. The question layer is what we build so they can take it.

The question path needs to be available throughout the experience, not just at the start. Interruptions used to break the flow. Now, the right question at the right moment is often what makes the whole thing land.

At its best, the question path carries connected context: answers that know who is asking, what they care about, and what just happened. That context is the difference between a generic Q&A box and an experience that becomes personal.

This goes deeper than bolting a chatbot onto every website, event, and store. We still want someone to hold the mic. We expect a way to raise our hands without waiting for the Q&A.

But will we know what to ask?

In 2024, I wrote that the future is questions, arguing that asking great questions was becoming a superpower skill worth deliberately developing. That piece was about us, the askers.

Now the other half is arriving. The tools are built. The expectation is spreading. Asking good questions is still hard. Most of us feel our need for an answer long before we can articulate it as a question.

Which means the burden shifts to the experience. The best question layers will meet people halfway: suggesting questions, sharpening them, clarifying before answering, and helping each person find the question they came in with.

Our audiences are already practicing every time they open Google AI Mode. Brands, and really any of us who need to communicate anything, need to prioritize building these two paths today.

Author the experience you want people to have. Then build the question layer that lets them make it theirs.

Because, together, the next great experience will not only be something people watch, read, attend, browse, or hear. It will be something they can question.

And the first question will always be the same: 
what’s in it for me?