‘As a user, I…’ am unreliable
Why when managers try to imagine their customers’ / users’ perspective they usually get it wrong
If like me, you design experiences for others to use, then you must have come across phrases like ‘With my customer hat on…’ or, ‘ As a user of the service myself, I…’.
These phrases are typically shared by business people, usually senior executives who are convinced they can envisage, understand, or anticipate their customers’ needs, reactions, and behaviours. Their justification is usually the fact they are consumers of the product or service themselves, or that they know someone who represents a specific consumer type.
I am sure, like me, you know they are wrong.
While researching creativity and problem solving, I came across a 2015 report by Johannes Hattula, of Imperial college London, which offers evidence that ‘Managerial Empathy Facilitates Egocentric Predictions of Consumer Preferences’ as the title of the report suggests. In simple terms, the report argues that unless managers actively try to suppress their own consumer /user behaviour, they are more than likely to infect their understanding of others with their own assumptions, beliefs, and behaviours. As the abstract states:
“Common wisdom suggests that managerial empathy (i.e., the mental process of taking a consumer perspective) helps executives separate their personal consumption preferences from those of consumers, thereby preventing egocentric preference predictions. The results of the present investigation, however, show exactly the opposite. First, the authors find that managerial empathy ironically accelerates self-reference in predictions of consumer preferences. Second, managers’ self-referential tendencies increase with empathy because taking a consumer perspective activates managers’ private consumer identity and, thus, their personal consumption preferences. Third, empathic managers’ self-referential preference predictions make them less likely to use market research results.”
Of course, the best antidote to imagining others’ behaviours or reactions to products and services is to actually engage them in the design.
The report: Managerial empathy facilitates egocentric predictions of consumer preferences. Hattula, Johannes D. ; Herzog, Walter ; Dahl, Darren W. ; Reinecke, Sven. Journal of Marketing Research, 2015, Vol.52(2), p.235(18)
