Product Strategy8 min read
What users say vs. what users do: the truth behind customer research
Interviews, surveys and feedback forms are full of sincere answers that turn out to be wrong. The problem is not that people lie. It is that they are poor witnesses to their own behaviour.
By Strategy Practice, Brand, strategy & AI
Every researcher has seen it. A participant says they would definitely use a feature, would pay for it, would switch to it tomorrow. The feature ships. They never touch it. Nobody lied. The person was sincere, and simply wrong about what they would do.
This gap between stated and actual behaviour is one of the most consistent findings in behavioural research. It does not make customer research useless. It means research has to be designed around what people can reliably report and what they cannot.
What people report well, and what they do not
| Reliable | Unreliable |
|---|---|
| What happened last time | What they usually do |
| What frustrated them | What would fix it |
| What they currently pay for | What they would pay for |
| The workaround they built | Whether they would use your version |
| Who else was involved | How the decision was really made |
The pattern is simple. People are good witnesses to concrete past events and poor forecasters of their own future. Good research leans hard on the first and treats the second with caution.
Ask about the last time
'How do you usually manage invoices?' invites a tidy, idealised answer. 'Tell me about the last invoice you chased. What happened?' invites a story, with the mess left in: the spreadsheet, the reminder in someone's calendar, the colleague who always knows. The story is where the insight lives.
- Ask for specific recent instances, not general habits.
- Ask what they did, then what they did next.
- Ask to see it: the spreadsheet, the inbox folder, the sticky note.
- Avoid hypotheticals until the end, and weigh them lightly.
Feature requests are clues, not specifications
When a customer asks for a feature, they are describing a solution to a problem they have not fully explained. The request is valuable, but its value is in the problem underneath. 'Can you add an export to Excel?' might mean they need to share with someone who has no account, or reconcile against another system, or simply do not trust your numbers.
Check what people say against what they do
Interviews tell you why. Behavioural data tells you what. Neither is complete alone. When an interview suggests a pattern, look for it in analytics or recordings. When analytics shows an odd pattern, use interviews to understand it. Confidence comes from the two agreeing.
People do not lie in research. They describe the person they intend to be, which is not always the person who shows up on Monday.
Strategy Practice
Brand, strategy & AI
The strategy practice covers positioning, product strategy, UX diagnosis and AI opportunity work. It writes about the commercial reasoning behind design decisions, and the organisational conditions that make good products possible.
