Let's go for a walk in our customer's shoes

There is a famous line in a poem by Mary T Lathrap who knew what it was like to walk in other people's shoes. An extract from her poem can be found in this verse below:

Just walk a mile in his moccasins
Before you abuse, criticize and accuse.
If just for one hour, you could find a way
To see through his eyes, instead of your own muse.         

We all know what walking a mile in someone else’s shoes refers to and why not judge until you have, it’s very true that you should only judge once you are in their position. In the product world, we try to do this with user personas too, however, it’s the last line of the verse above that really does hit home for me?“to see through his eyes, instead of your own muse.”?Especially for when we are talking about online users.

When creating a product or feature we talk heavily about the user, the user journey, the user personas, and the user funnel, but all too often we lose our way once the product is launched, we start to look at graphs, goals and targets. We are also more concerned with the new shiny feature we’re thinking about than stepping back and once again walking through the online experience as our users.

I try to do this very often and sometimes for no reason whatsoever, just because I need to be a user. I need to be a potential customer, I need to tickle the keyboard as if I’ve never seen this product before.

One time that I performed the act of clicking in the gloves of a user (I couldn’t think of a better analogy), I stepped back and I really got deep into character. I made myself believe that I had the problem that a user would have in order to want our product. I made up a fake wife in my head, she was extremely nervous and a very cautious lady, she asked a hundred questions, well it felt like that. I opened Google, I Googled the term I had made up and to my joy the site I was wanting to evaluate popped up on the second result.

Although I first did what nearly every search user does, I clicked on the first result. I asked this website some of the hundred questions I (and my fake wife) had, I dutifully checked each answer off as I found the answers, but after some time I hit too many dead ends. I still had questions, my wife wouldn’t let me buy the product.

What does nearly every user do at this point? They go back to Google and try the second result, I asked the same questions on the site I was working on and to my horror, the site didn’t do too well either. These questions were basic, they were questions we had missed, we had not seen the forest for the trees, and the answers were obvious in my head, but we hadn’t spelt it out. I pushed on pretending I had found the answers to my basic questions and once over that massive hurdle I found we were doing a great job. Well, I thought so and my fake wife was a little less nervous at this stage too.

I went back to my Product team armed with the question that we had forgotten to answer, the response from nearly everyone I spoke with was…

OMG so obvious, why haven’t we been doing that?

and

Are our competitors doing this?

I dug deeper, and to my surprise, very few competitors had covered the basics either, we were all too busy selling the dream, with beautiful pictures, great quotes from customers, brilliant sales patter and awesome quotes and payment systems.

We made some new beautiful designs that answered all of my questions, I placed some?A/B tests?in there and yes it did make a difference. Every person that viewed this new design was amazingly 25% more likely to become a customer. Now, all we need to do is get more users to see it, that was the next challenge.

I have now done this to many features that I’ve tested and evaluated, I walk in the customers’ shoes all too often, I sit next to customers and watch them, I watch my 7-year-old use the site (does he have questions!), I get my 78-year-old Mom to imagine she needs what we are selling, I even get my very literal thinking real wife to try it. I walk a mile in our user's moccasins and I accompany them while they walk a mile too, it’s incredibly valuable, give it a go and make sure you really get into character and maybe buy some of these.

Footnote: As well as being an American poet Mary T. Lathrap was also known at the time as the “The Daniel Webster of Prohibition”. She was a licensed preacher in the Methodist Episcopal Church and a suffragist. She co-founded Michigan’s suffragette organization and for almost 20 years, she was identified with the progressive women of Michigan who had temperance, purity, and prohibition as their watchwords. She knew a thing or two about walking in other people's shoes. She was also all too aware of the decisions being made for her by men, decisions men of power were making without even a thought of trying to walk in the shoes of a woman.