You Don’t Know What You Don’t Know: Lessons From User Research

People are endlessly unique, varied, and surprising. My favourite part of doing research at zu is talking to people and learning about them. I’ve had the pleasure of speaking with all kinds of individuals, from lettuce farmers to gymnastics coaches, and from registered nurses to steel fabricators. Each interaction has taught me something new and unexpected.

Sometimes an organisation might opt to skip user research. “Let’s cut the costs and jump straight to design.” Not a great plan! Creating solutions based on assumptions is like flying blind. It can cost the organisation more in the long run because their product, tools, or platform are created without knowing the users. After talking to people, I’ve also learned that a bad experience also costs the users. The cost comes at the expense of their time, their finances, and even their well-being.

So why do research? Because you don’t know what you don’t know. What users want, need, and feel isn’t always obvious. These things may seem obvious in hindsight, but are anything but obvious when the client is staring down complex problems with uncertain solutions.

So here are some of the obvious and not so obvious things I’ve learned from talking to users.

1. You’re creating ripple effects in people’s lives.

If you’re putting anything out there for people to use, you are accountable for how it affects their lives. I’ve heard people talk about serious downstream effects that extended well beyond a bad digital interaction:

• Taking time off work for an in-person appointment because the digital experience wasn’t working.
• Being charged late fees for missed bill payments because the automatic payment signup was onerous.
• Overpaying for insurance because the options were confusing and overwhelming.
• And, of course, just having a downright grumpy day because a terrible interface pissed them off. (Don’t judge—you’ve been there too!)

These downstream effects might seem small and mundane, but they ripple out and impact the user’s life in ways we don’t always see.

2. You are not your users.

When it comes to your product, service, or platform, you’re actually kind of weird. No normal person knows as much as you do about whatever it is you’re working on. You expect them to know, but they don’t. I can’t emphasise this enough.

One of the most common issues I see is when the structure and navigation of a website reflect a client’s organisational structure. The client looks at the website and thinks, “Yes, this seems like the most obvious and reasonable way to organise the information.” But their users? They don’t think that way, and they inevitably struggle to find what they’re looking for on these sites. You are not your users! Engage with them and learn how they think, and how their knowledge differs from yours.

3. Most users are guided by feelings, not logic.

When you design a system, you’re (probably) going about it in a thoughtful, reasonable, and methodical way. You’re in a cool and rational frame of mind. Your user, however, is not. They interact with your logical system in erratic and unpredictable ways, randomly trying one thing after another. They’re guided by intuition and gut feelings, forming impressions based on emotion.

I’ll never forget one user who was wrestling with a confusing interface before she said, “I’m so stupid.” The UI was at fault, but it made her feel stupid, and she blamed herself. Moments like this shape the emotional relationship users have with products. If that relationship is negative, they might never come back. Your reputation largely hinges on how your experience makes people feel.

4. Users are individual humans.

I dislike the term “user” because it dehumanises the individuals using the product, but people react weirdly when I say things like, “This is how the humans are using the app.” In my time talking to individuals across every kind of project, they’ve invited me to peek into their rich, interesting, inspiring, imperfect, contradictory, and messy lives. They are each the main character in their own story. But we often fail to humanise our users because we’re distracted by the system that’s placed between us and them, turning these real people into an abstract extension of our business goals. The user’s real goals, wants, needs, and struggles become fuzzy and imprecise, leading to designs tailored to that abstraction.

5. Being distracted is your user’s default state.

We like to imagine someone quietly using our product in a peaceful, distraction-free environment, focusing on each word with the attention of a practised monk. Reality is much different. A colleague recently told us about a usability test where a mother persistently worked her way through tasks while juggling constant disruptions from a lively toddler and a barking dog. Her lived experience was alive, imperfect, and distracted.

Users don’t have much cognitive capacity for digital interactions. This has been referred to as the “toilet theory of the internet,” which posits that the majority of online interactions happen while the user is sitting on the toilet. You can take this literally or metaphorically, but it’s meant to remind us that our content, tools, and carefully planned interactions are just a minor blip among the deluge of online distractions vying for the user’s attention. Asking users to describe the context of how they use your platform or product is a great way to gauge the degree and nature of the distractions you’re competing with. Fortunately, I’ve only literally encountered the toilet theory once in all my user research.

6. Your user’s main goal is to participate in an exchange from one human to another.

A user’s goal is not, “I will navigate this platform,” or, “I will use this tool.” Their main goal is, “I will get what I need from this organisation,” and the platform is just a step along the way. Your central product, tool, platform, website, or whatever is not as important as you might think. I get it, you go to work every day and think about it. But it’s little more than an interface that facilitates the more important piece of the puzzle: the communication between you and another individual.

Whatever you’re doing, if you have an end-user, it all boils down to this: an exchange from you to them, and an exchange from them to you. We often get tunnel vision on the tool itself, but if you shift your focus to the person on the other side of the exchange, you can adjust the tool to better facilitate that human connection.

7. Users hold grudges.

It isn’t that they’re petty; negativity bias is an evolutionary mechanism: remember this very bad thing so you can avoid dying from it in the future. And while a bad online bill payment experience isn’t a matter of life or death, our brains are wired to prioritise and hang onto negative experiences nonetheless.

If you’ve created a pain point in a user’s life because you didn’t understand their needs, they will remember that. I often hear people telling woeful stories about bad experiences they’ve had with organisations, sometimes carrying these stories around for years. They’ve been offended and injured, and they won’t forget it. Oh, and they’ll tell their friends about it too.

8. Users with cognitive challenges feel ignored and forgotten.

An estimated 16% of the world’s population lives with a disability. These are your end-users too. They already face many challenges day-to-day. By failing to engage with them, you risk adding another challenge to their lives, with potentially dramatic and harmful ripple effects.

I once interviewed a user with a language processing disorder who mistakenly chose an insurance plan ill-suited to his needs because the website content was confusing and complex. He ended up losing coverage for important medication, creating a financial hardship. His description of the humiliation, frustration, and resignation was heart-wrenching. Don’t cause this kind of problem—make the effort to engage with these users. They may be hard to reach, but as I said in the first point: if you’re putting content, products, or services out there for people to use, you are accountable for how it affects their lives.

9. People always surprise me.

Expect the unexpected. What a cliché, right? But it’s true! I’ve talked to many end-users, and I’ve learned to set aside my expectations. I encounter new and unexpected perspectives every single time. People are diverse, varied, and unique. If you think you know what to expect, you need to engage with your users. Research makes you humble. Your assumptions, ideas, creative solutions, and expectations about how your product or platform should work will be challenged the moment you start talking to real people.

So there you have it: my favourite lessons I’ve learned from users. These insights have taught me that user research is indispensable because we don’t know what we don’t know. Sure, we can bypass user engagement and move forward based on our own assumptions. But this is a risk, not only for the business but for the end-users as well. At zu, we’ve taken on many “rescue operations” from organisations that took that risk.