Why asking “What‘s your pain point?” doesn’t work

Designers need to dig deeper in order to uncover issues with products. Image credit: NEOM, Unsplash

Like many of you recently, I deactivated my X/Twitter account to use BlueSky. A couple of things struck me when I made the move:

1. The move was very easy: deactivating the Twitter account I’ve had for almost 15 years took me about two minutes.
2. The BlueSky experience is so much better than Twitter for me. I haven’t been called a nasty name on BlueSky once and blocking users is effective.

This made me wonder why I waited so long to ditch Twitter since now it’s so obvious that it was a horrible experience. It’s because while I was in the experience, it was more difficult to take a step back and reflect on why I was still on Twitter. I joined Twitter in 2009 because that was where other designers like me there. Over time, the experience had become like what it was like walking down the street as a college student living in 80s/90s New York City: street harassment was the norm, then on the street, and now on Twitter. The only difference is that being on Twitter is optional.

How wild is it that I thought that the “price” of being online was perpetual harassment and name-calling? But now I know that I wasn’t alone.

Here lies a big lesson to learn for designers and managers of experiences. Your users may be having a terrible experience, but it is also likely that they…