{"id":2961,"date":"2018-08-27T07:00:18","date_gmt":"2018-08-27T07:00:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blog.qualaroo.com\/?p=2961"},"modified":"2025-08-28T08:35:39","modified_gmt":"2025-08-28T08:35:39","slug":"how-to-think-like-your-users","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/web-staging.qualaroo.com\/blog\/how-to-think-like-your-users\/","title":{"rendered":"Think Like a Customer with These Simple Frameworks"},"content":{"rendered":"<p class=\"p1\"><span class=\"s1\">When you work on your product every day, it\u2019s easy to design for a better product, not necessarily a better user experience. There are many dangerous assumptions lurking around our natural human tendencies to believe that what is good for us is good for the customer. But how <i>does<\/i> a company go about getting into the mindset of its users? It turns out user feedback plays a huge role. <\/span><\/p>\n<h2 class=\"p1\"><span class=\"ez-toc-section\" id=\"Understand_Their_Needs_Throughout_the_Life_Cycle\"><\/span><span class=\"s1\"><b>Understand Their Needs <i>Throughout<\/i> the Life Cycle <\/b><\/span><span class=\"ez-toc-section-end\"><\/span><\/h2>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-2963\" src=\"https:\/\/qualaroo.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/08\/Customer-Life-Cycle.png\" alt=\"Customer-Life-Cycle\" width=\"560\" height=\"315\"><\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\"><span class=\"s1\">For <a href=\"https:\/\/qualaroo.com\/customer-feedback\/top-questions-to-ask-users\/\">user feedback<\/a> to have a real impact on a company, it\u2019s simply not enough to survey existing customers after customer service interactions and call it a day. A good user experience team should understand as much as possible about the customer in <i>all<\/i> stages of their journey. Why? Because there are many uses for such specific knowledge:<\/span><\/p>\n<ul class=\"ul1\">\n<li class=\"li1\">\n<h4><span class=\"s1\">Understanding customer intentions by prompting first-time visitors with a simple \u201cWhy are you here today?\u201d can help define messaging as well as provide attribution for direct load population.<br \/>\n<\/span><\/h4>\n<\/li>\n<li class=\"li1\">\n<h4><span class=\"s1\">Contextualizing conversion behaviors with questions specific to a certain type of action can help your team find missing pieces or pain points within landing pages or the flow of the sales funnel.<br \/>\n<\/span><\/h4>\n<\/li>\n<li class=\"li1\">\n<h4><span class=\"s1\">Pulsing users with net promoter\u2013type questions over their life span as a customer can reveal whether they are an active promoter or detractor.<br \/>\n<\/span><\/h4>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p class=\"p1\"><span class=\"s1\">Understanding users throughout their journey requires different questions and approaches\u2014you need to gain a complete picture of all the types of users engaged with a business at any one point. &nbsp;&nbsp;<\/span><\/p>\n<h2 class=\"p1\"><span class=\"ez-toc-section\" id=\"Practice_Empathy\"><\/span><span class=\"s1\"><b>Practice Empathy <\/b><\/span><span class=\"ez-toc-section-end\"><\/span><\/h2>\n<p class=\"p1\"><span class=\"s1\">When it comes to consumer feedback, gathering data isn\u2019t the problem. Michael Ventura, CEO of Sub Rosa and author of <i>Applied Empathy: The New Language of Leadership<\/i>, explained the importance of empathy in an interview with Forbes. <\/span><\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p class=\"p1\"><span class=\"s1\">\u201cAll of these CMOs and organizations have massive data lakes with more data than they will ever be able to go through,\u201d Ventura said. \u201cSo, in some respects, the only way they\u2019re going to be able to make informed decisions is to use empathy to understand their data.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p class=\"p1\"><span class=\"s1\">Empathy is what allows a company to actually apply what it learns about its users in order to grow and adapt to their needs. Gathering qualitative data from consumers about their behavior, preferences and intentions is key to walking a mile in their proverbial shoes, which can lead your company to make good decisions.<\/span><\/p>\n<h2 class=\"p1\"><span class=\"ez-toc-section\" id=\"You_Are_Not_Your_Users\"><\/span><span class=\"s1\"><b>You Are Not Your Users<\/b><\/span><span class=\"ez-toc-section-end\"><\/span><\/h2>\n<p class=\"p1\"><span class=\"s1\">No matter how diverse, how talented, how open-minded the UX team is, they are not the users. Only the users are the users. When a product management team is living in the product, it\u2019s very tempting to make assumptions about the user experience. The dangers of things like the false consensus effect are real and tangible. <\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\"><span class=\"s1\">Knowing a product inside and out does not correlate to knowing a user inside and out. The two are completely separate bodies of knowledge but must work together to achieve a successful product and consumer relationship. This is why \u201cyou are not your users\u201d has become something of a mantra in the user experience field and is good advice to heed.<\/span><\/p>\n<h2 class=\"p1\"><span class=\"ez-toc-section\" id=\"Observe\"><\/span><span class=\"s1\"><b>Observe<\/b><\/span><span class=\"ez-toc-section-end\"><\/span><\/h2>\n<p class=\"p1\"><span class=\"s1\">One of the best ways to find out how a user is interacting with your site is to simply watch them. Visits to a user\u2019s environment to see exactly how they get along with your tool can yield invaluable feedback. An attentive user experience professional not only sees what a person is doing on screen, they can also read the body language and facial expressions that further explain how that person feels. <\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\"><span class=\"s1\">However, in-person observation may not be feasible for smaller companies. Tools like FullStory can help designers get page insights and even have live co-browsing sessions to observe what people are doing. Observation can provide a window into the user\u2019s mind, and it\u2019s invaluable to a user experience team because it cuts out a lot of the guesswork involved with understanding user data. &nbsp;<\/span><\/p>\n<h2 class=\"p1\"><span class=\"ez-toc-section\" id=\"Be_Timely_in_Applying_Feedback\"><\/span><span class=\"s1\"><b>Be Timely in Applying Feedback <\/b><\/span><span class=\"ez-toc-section-end\"><\/span><\/h2>\n<p class=\"p1\"><span class=\"s1\">After all this effort to collect the right feedback from the right user at the right time, wouldn\u2019t it be a shame to have to throw it out the window and start from scratch? Unfortunately, this is a frustrating reality for many companies. <\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\"><span class=\"s1\"><a href=\"https:\/\/qualaroo.com\/blog\/feedback-has-a-shelf-life-make-sure-to-activate\/\">User feedback is a perishable item<\/a>, which must be activated as quickly as possible to retain its value. Acting on out-of-date feedback can result in poor decisions, such as Blackberry doubling down on the physical keyboard even though consumers had begun switching to the digital alternative of Android and iPhones. Feedback can start to go stale as soon as there are changes to your product, the competitive landscape or your audience&#8217;s behavior. Acting on current feedback that\u2019s still relevant to your audience is key to creating the best outcomes for your users. <\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>When you work on your product every day, it\u2019s easy to design for a better product, not necessarily a better user experience. There are many dangerous assumptions lurking around our natural human tendencies to believe that what is good for us is good for the customer. But how does a company go about getting into&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":28,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[69,70],"class_list":["post-2961","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-user-experience","tag-user-feedback"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/web-staging.qualaroo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2961","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/web-staging.qualaroo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/web-staging.qualaroo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web-staging.qualaroo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/28"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web-staging.qualaroo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2961"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/web-staging.qualaroo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2961\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":22694,"href":"https:\/\/web-staging.qualaroo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2961\/revisions\/22694"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/web-staging.qualaroo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2961"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web-staging.qualaroo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2961"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web-staging.qualaroo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2961"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}