NI offers over 1000 products for the data acquisition industry. Most of those are hardware, and most work with one or two of five prominent chassis families. Narrowing down the selections to one family can make the overall task of configuring a system less daunting. This paper aims to provide a few questions to ask the end user. The answers can often allow you to focus on a few or just one family quickly and hence facilitate selecting the rest of the hardware required. First, we explain the questions to ask. Then we provide a graphic illustrating how to use the answers in the decision.