Four Levels Of Customer Understanding

Vitaly Friedman May 22, 2026 0 comments Four Levels Of Customer Understanding 9 min read Design , UX , Design Patterns Share on Twitter ,  LinkedIn About The Author Vitaly Friedman loves beautiful content and doesn’t like to give in easily. When he is not writing, he’s most probably running front-end & UX … More about Vitaly ↬ Email Newsletter Your (smashing) email Weekly tips on front-end & UX . Trusted by 182,000+ folks. What people say, feel, think, and do are often very different things. To understand the underlying reasons for user behavior, it helps to look beyond the surface and explore hidden motivations, root causes, and the different layers of reality that shape how people act. Brought to you by Measuring UX Impact , friendly video course on UX and design patterns by Vitaly. Many companies think they know fairly well what their users want and need, and how they make their decisions. Yet most of the time these are merely big assumptions and big hunches — with little real evidence to support them. In practice, obvious reasons might be true, but they rarely paint the full picture. To understand our customers, we must triangulate across four levels of customer understanding by Hannah Shamji. It’s a useful way to think about the underlying reasons for user behavior, hidden motivations, and the complex layers of messy and noisy reality that are often overlooked. Let’s see how it works. Four levels of customer understanding: what people say, think or feel, do, and why they do it. By Hannah Shamji . ( Large preview ) Don’t Ask Users Your Burning Questions To learn about customers, it might seem reasonable to ask people what they think and draw conclusions from it. But it’s rarely an effective way to get actionable answers. In fact, as it turns out, what people think , feel , say , and do are often very different things . People don’t always cancel because they want to. Reasons for voluntary and involuntary customer churn. By Emily Anderson . ( Large preview ) As Erika Hall wrote , asking a question directly is the worst way to get a true and useful answer to that question. We don’t always understand or are aware of our true motivations . We often apply our own context and interpretations to questions. We also exaggerate ( a lot! ). We focus on edge cases and unrealistic scenarios, and we favor short-term goals over long-term goals. So if users say that they absolutely need to compare products in a table , it doesn’t mean that they couldn’t get to their underlying goal without it . “Possible” vs. “Probable” Just to indicate how tricky listening to words alone is: even little nuances in words chosen matter. In practice, users are rarely precise in expressing their thoughts, and a good example is the distinction between possible , plausible , and probable , as discovered by Thomas D’hooge . Numerical interpretation of probability phrases and their ranges. Source . ( Large preview ) A study on Dutch verbal probability te