✍️ Emily Williams, June 2026

⏱️ 8-minute read | 🖼️ 21 painstakingly edited GIFs

I’m rewatching Parks and Recreation for the first time since I started doing user-centred research in 2022. Leslie Knope (Amy Poehler) is the Deputy Director of the Parks and Recreation Department of Pawnee, Indiana. I love Leslie for her cheerfulness, compassion, and dedication to public service. So I was delighted to see that in the first ever scene, she’s doing a Likert-style survey (recreation below) with a little girl in a playground. “One of my heroes is doing user research!”, I thought. And then as I watched on, “Oh no… Oh Leslie…” 🙈

Leslie surveys a little girl (Subtitled).

Leslie surveys a little girl (Subtitled).

Artist’s impression of Leslie’s playground experience survey.

As I watched Season 1, I observed 10 Don’ts for User Research (’Knopes’ 🚫) along with 5 Do’s (’Yes-lies’ ✅). I’m excited to share these with you below. You can also find a shareable infographic in the Appendix.

Knope 1️⃣: Answering for participants 🤡

In the opening scene, this poor little girl is just trying to play in the sandpit. She has no interest in Leslie’s survey. So Leslie answers for her - and it’s the best option.

🧑‍🏫 Lesson 1: Don’t put words into your participants’ mouths. Let them speak for themselves.

Knope 2️⃣: Promising solutions 🤞

When Leslie runs the monthly public forum, a local nurse (Ann) complains about an abandoned pit behind her house. After the room applaud Ann’s tirade, Leslie is moved to promise to turn the pit into a park:

I pinky promise all of you that I will help. And I will go to that location tomorrow. And we will fill in that pit. And then when that’s done, we’re gonna put a park on the land.

🧑‍🏫 Lesson 2: Don’t promise outcomes or jump to solutions before understanding the real problem.

Knope 3️⃣: Asking leading questions 🙂‍↕️

Next episode, the team turn to door-to-door canvasing to drum up public support for the park-to-pit project. After some unsavoury feedback, Leslie summarises a lesson she learned from Karl Rove:

If you want to guarantee the results of a survey, you design the question to give you the answer that you want!

So she comes out with this stonker:

Wouldn’t you agree, like most decent Americans, that it would be a good idea to turn the abandoned lot on Sullivan Street into a beautiful community park?

🧑‍🏫 Lesson 3: Don’t bias your questions to get the answer that you want.

Knope 4️⃣: Manipulating participants 🤥

When her leading question didn’t work, Leslie strolled even further down Bias Avenue…

She pretended she’d surveyed at least 10 crystal method users, and that the majority shared the dissenter’s opinion.

When this tactic also failed, she turned to a nifty bit of emotional manipulation:

You don't care about your kids if you don't support this park!

🧑‍🏫 Lesson 4: Don’t try to influence or guilt participants into agreeing with you.

Knope 5️⃣: Planting participants 🤫