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How to use questions in problem solving

Written by: Noah Learner Tags: newsletter, critical thinking

Published: Apr 21, 2025

Takeaways:  

• Always spend time defining the problem exhaustively.
• Base your reasoning on solid foundations.
• Define and question your assumptions.
• Ask yourself, "What tool will help me answer this question / or solve this problem?"
• Ask yourself, "How can I shift my perspective to see the problem differently?".
• Test your solutions
• Ask yourself, "what did I learn here?"
• Repeat, with your learnings weaved in

Sometimes, the questions we ask are more important than their answers.

They kick off searches, deeper exploration, projects, and often, lead us to great and unexpected discoveries.

This story is about a nagging problem, the questions I asked myself while fixing it, and what it has to do with SEO.

Building email templates that work across the 20+ often archaic email clients is notoriously difficult.

Simple text is easy. Anything else can be brutal. Even a single column email like ours was failing for iPhone's email client.

Why is my email template broken for iPhone users?

Questions can also be framed as problems

The first questions we ask stem the assumptions we have about the problem. So I started with assumptions.

I'd assumed the following to be true:

• The responsive template offered by the email tool would work perfectly across all devices.
• What I could see in the preview tool was what it would look like in the actual email client.

These seemed to be perfectly reasonable. See any problems yet?

I tried to define the foundational truths that couldn't be broken down further in order to reason up from there. You could call this first principles thinking.

Except I hadn't questioned my assumptions enough (or at all).

I could see the raw HTML inside our email tool, which looked correct. And it looked great on my phone and desktop.

I'd heard from others there was an issue, but my tools couldn't help me see it.

Sometimes you have to change your reference point entirely. Instead, I asked myself: 

What tool could I use that would help me see and define the problem better?

Litmus is a pretty sweet app for building and testing emails. I'd heard of them at MozCon local in 2015 and hadn't forgotten about them.

1. I created a free trial account and imported my email into their system.
2. Holy cow, within 1 minute I had previews of my email in 20 email clients.
3. I could see the failing email clients (*Shakes fist at iPhone Email*).
4. And it allowed me to see the rendered HTML of my email.

It was eye opening — and not in a good way.

What was super clean HTML in the email tool had been converted into HTML with lots of inline styles. Some were broken and some were nonsensical.

Now that I could clearly see the problem, more questions popped up

What do I need to change to fix how the styles operate / are inlined?

It turns out that the fix was a simple media query that overrides the inline styles.

I'll pay it forward here if you have to ever build emails (and yes good old stackexchange FTW):

@media only screen and (max-device-width: 1000px) { body { padding: 5px !important; } }

Asking good questions is a transferable skill

The skills we learn are transferable to other areas of our life.

I knew javascript was evil.

No, but seriously, I knew that there was like a difference between raw and rendered html due to Javascript. So many crawling and indexation problems come down to this. How do you look at this in your practice? I love the View Rendered Source Chrome extension.

We face problems all day long in SEO (and life) and having a structured way to solve them may mean simply starting with questions — and your assumptions are a perfect place to ask some tough ones. 

Gratitude

Thanks go out to Ash Buckles, Renee Roberts and Stephanie Maio for helping me see the light.