Four Levels Of Customer Understanding

Many companies think they know fairly well what their users want and need, and how they make their decisions. Yet most of the time these are merely big assumptions and big hunches — with little real evidence to support them. In practice, obvious reasons might be true, but they rarely paint the full picture. To understand our customers, we must triangulate across four levels of customer understanding by Hannah Shamji. It’s a useful way to think about the underlying reasons for user behavior, hidden motivations, and the complex layers of messy and noisy reality that are often overlooked. Let’s see how it works. Don’t Ask Users Your Burning Questions To learn about customers, it might seem reasonable to ask people what they think and draw conclusions from it. But it’s rarely an effective way to get actionable answers. In fact, as it turns out, what people think , feel , say , and _do_ are often very different things . As Erika Hall wrote , asking a question directly is the worst way to get a true and useful answer to that question. We don’t always understand or are aware of our true motivations . We often apply our own context and interpretations to questions. We also exaggerate ( a lot! ). We focus on edge cases and unrealistic scenarios, and we favor short-term goals over long-term goals. So if users say that they absolutely need to compare products in a table , it doesn’t mean that they couldn’t get to their underlying goal without it . “Possible” vs. “Probable” Just to indicate how tricky listening to words alone is: even little nuances in words chosen matter. In practice, users are rarely precise in expressing their thoughts, and a good example is the distinction between possible , plausible , and probable , as discovered by Thomas D'hooge . A study on Dutch verbal probability terms shows how unreliable the choice of words is. While extreme words have some agreement, terms like “possible,” “maybe,” “uncertain,” or “likely” lead to a wide spread of interpretations