Sorry! You won’t fit into your users’ shoes
Thoughts on how putting yourself in your users’ shoes is affecting your design decisions.
If you’re a designer I’m sure you would have definitely come across this thing.
“Put yourself in your user’s shoes 👟”
After spending some time in design, I have realized that this is the scariest thing I have been accustomed to. Whenever we try to do this, we bring our own version of the user and push our biases with a fake user mask 🎭. We tend to spice up things by adding our own personal needs without even realizing it.
This doesn’t just stop with the designers.
If we can put ourselves in our user’s shoes, why not others?
As a user…
If I was the user…
A typical user would…
Users usually…
This is how a user would use this…
We get bombarded daily with different versions of our users from our PMs, engineers, and colleagues. The result? — a badly designed product that’s far from what the users desire.
Here’s a personal example,
A year ago when I was looking for opportunities, I was designing my resume. I wanted to be empathetic towards the person who will be consuming it. So what did I do?
I did the thing which every designer was taught to do.
“I tried to put myself in my user’s shoes”
After a year, I joined a company and was hiring folks there. I realized the resume I had designed earlier was not the one I was expecting as a hiring manager. The things that I was looking at on a resume as a hiring manager were different from the things I assumed a hiring manager would need when I tried to think from their shoes. I failed to understand my user.
After a series of instances like this, I started to question this practice. Instead of using this as a way to build empathy, we have started to use this as a tool to know our users. And we have moved so far with this practice that we have failed to realize how this affects our decisions.
Here are my thoughts on how this practice is affecting our design decisions…
Crossing the line
First things first, we as designers tend to cross the line.
While an artist can express their views freely, designers don’t have this luxury often. A designer’s goal is to solve a problem for a specific segment of users.
When we try to put ourselves in our users’ shoes, we become over empathetic and try to think of similar problems we have faced in order to relate better. The moment we realize that we have experienced similar kinds of problems, we tend to treat ourselves as a user. Now the entire problem space has the designer’s problems too. Since the designer is close to his/her problems, the designer loses sight of others' problems and ends up solving his/her own problems thinking that he has solved something for the users. The lack of an actual user’s voice is the main reason for this.
It’s better that we as designers do not cross the line and remind ourselves that we are designing for others and not for ourselves (Unless you are 100% sure that you are a real user too).
Let’s say we have crossed the line. Now, here are the other reasons why this practice is not enabling us to make the right calls.
Bias blind-spot
The reason why designers cross the line and don’t realize that this practice is skewing their decision is because of this cognitive bias — the bias blind-spot.
“the tendency to see oneself as less biased than other people”
Research says almost everyone has this bias. Only 1 in 661 realized that he/she is more biased than the others.
Here’s an example
The moment we cross the line and tend to reflect our users’ thoughts, we are unconsciously reflecting our own thoughts and biases. Unless we are aware of it, we end up making a ‘kichadi’ — (a mix of everything), and not a biryani (the ultimate recipe).
The innate designer’s bias
I’ve always had this thought about how users react to products —
When two products are similar in terms of their offerings, the one with the better design wins.
Recently, I was put in a situation that tested this thought. About a month back, I was supposed to renew my bike insurance. I’ve always been a big fan of Acko insurance because of its design and simplicity. But surprisingly I went ahead with Digit Insurance because it had a premium which was 300 rupees less. Instead of behaving like a designer who had those above-said thoughts, I behaved like an ideal user. Maybe the ideal user really focuses on the cost and is willing to sacrifice the experience or the design aspect a little bit.
This made me realize that there’s always a tinge of “designer” in our thoughts and in our versions of the users making the “👟 Shoes practice” a biased one.
Anchor
Let’s say we have crossed the line but are not biased. Now the next thing we suffer is the Anchor bias.
Anchoring bias is a cognitive bias that causes us to rely too heavily on the first piece of information we are given about a topic.
Since we don’t have the real users and just assume what they would need, we tend to anchor on to the first piece of information that we get.
Let’s assume you are improving the conversion rate in a checkout flow. Now you try to put yourself in your user’s shoes and try to find out where the friction is. And let’s say you found Step 2 is where the friction is and X is the reason for it. Since we don’t have our real users here, we stop with this (Step 2 and X reason) and we design our solution with this surface-level information. We anchor on this information X without digging deep into this insight. Maybe Y was the actual reason for the friction to happen. The real user wasn’t present to unearth those true problems leaving the designer with a false positive.
While putting yourself in your user’s shoes got you to problem X, it did not help you to discover the actual problem Y.
Lastly, why do we do this?
A lame excuse
Truth bombs!
One of the honest reasons why designers put themselves in their users' shoes is because it is easy. True research is hard. Building your hypothesis, getting to your users, analyzing their inputs, and deciding what to do is hard. It takes a toil to do this.
I think sometimes we as designers just use “👟 Users’ shoes” as a lame excuse to not get our hands dirty.
We will never be our users.
We will never understand their context.
We will never be able to reflect their thoughts completely.
Again, I’m not saying this is a bad practice. But, putting yourself in your user’s shoes is just a way to build empathy and not a way to know your users.
So designers,
- Empathize with your users but try not to cross the line
- Beware of your biases
- Build a solid research plan and try to get in touch with your users often.
- Finally, stop being lazy and start hearing it from our users!
Happy designing…
P.s: A lot of you may disagree with these thoughts. Maybe you are blind-sighted by your biases here 😅. Think!
