You Are Not (Like) The User

Many people are likely familiar with the classic UX adage "You are not the user." But too often, we apply this mantra only at a surface level.

"You are not the user" does not only refer to using your own product. It points to the more fundamental differences between you and your users.

During graduate school, while working on my Masters thesis, I researched community organizers. I had an idea for a platform that would help them coordinate efforts, solicit volunteer help, and request resources. In the earlier days of smartphone hype, it was "obvious" to me that it should be a mobile app. Early in that research, it became apparent that many of the people I was targeting worked primarily on desktop computers, often not even laptops. Focusing on mobile usage would have been a fundamentally wrong fit for my target users.

The users we build our products and services for differ from us in a myriad of ways, some more relevant to our offering than others.

Designers do well to remember that not everybody has 5k displays and perfect vision to read that light gray text in an equally light font weight. Engineers and developers do well to remember that not everybody thinks about API calls, data governance and clean rooms, or possibly even latency.

People have different realities that shape their mental models and, in turn, their expectations of what an experience should be like: how it works, how it feels, and how it looks. Their realities are also made up of additional contexts and constraints, whether that is an existing legacy SaaS stack to integrate with, hardware to connect to, or very unique regulatory requirements to be met (ask me about a car dealership requirement that certain paperwork needs to be printed on a very specific type of paper in some states).

These can all be nuances that affect product market fit. About some of these, we make assumptions, explicitly or implicitly. Many of these things are unknown unknowns.

And that is why UX research is such an important part of developing products and services. Whether you want to use your own product or not is not exactly the question.