4 / 10 · 3 min read

You Are Not the User

The hardest thing in building a product is escaping your own head, and noticing that what feels obvious to you is invisible to everyone else.

There is a cruel twist in making anything. The very moment you understand how your product works, you lose the ability to see it the way a stranger would. You built the thing. You know where everything lives, what every word means, which button does what and why. That knowledge feels like expertise, and it is also a kind of blindness, the exact reason so much of what we make is clear to us and baffling to everyone else.

It has a name: the curse of knowledge. Once you know a thing, you cannot un-know it, and you cannot truly imagine not knowing it. The map in your head is so complete that you forget the user is standing in the dark, holding nothing, seeing your product for the first and possibly only time.

The most dangerous sentence in the room

“It's obvious” has ruined more products than any bug. And it is obvious, to you, and to the people who sit near you, who have heard it explained, who carry the same map. When you call something obvious you are quietly saying “obvious to a person who already knows what I know.” That person does not exist on the other side of the screen.

It is the shopkeeper who has rearranged the shelves a hundred times and can no longer feel how a first-time customer freezes in the doorway, with no idea the bread is kept in the back. It is the local giving directions by landmarks only locals know, “turn where the old bakery used to be.” Perfectly clear, and perfectly useless, to the one person who needed the help.

Design is an act of imagination

So the work was never really about screens. It is about holding a second mind in your head, a person who is not you. Someone tired, half-distracted, on a cracked phone in bad light, in the middle of something else, who has never seen this before and will give it about eight seconds before deciding whether it is worth their patience. Every good decision is made on behalf of that imagined stranger, against the steady pull of your own ease.

This is why watching one real person use your product for ten minutes teaches you more than a month of your own certainty. You are not gathering data. You are buying back, in small painful instalments, the innocence you lost the day you started building, the ability to be confused by your own work.

You are not the user. You will never again be the user of the thing you made; you know too much. The most you can do is keep a chair at the table for the person who is, and defend their confusion against your own knowledge, patiently, every single time.

And the moment you take that absent person seriously, really hold them in mind, the work changes shape. You stop arranging screens and start doing something much older and more human: trying to speak clearly to someone who isn't in the room.