Talk to Your Users

Erik Johnson

May 14, 2025

Gonna keep saying it until everyone does it

When he was in preschool, my son refused to wear his puffy winter coat to school. Wanting to avoid a battle and get him out the door on time, I let it slide a few times, but my wife and I were baffled. We tried to figure out why he wouldn’t wear it. He’d picked it out himself, he’d worn it to school before, he wore it on the weekends with no complaints. But now he wouldn’t wear it to school.

They did a lot of outside activities at that preschool — long forest walks as well as group activities and unstructured playground time, and with just a lighter jacket, we were worried. “He’ll get cold and realize he needs it eventually,” we thought. But as the temperatures plunged, he still refused. Finally we sat him down to figure out what was going on.

He was adamant: “I’ll wear it to the park or to the museum, but not to school.”

“But why?” I asked. “Is the coat too big?”

“No,” he said.

“Is someone picking on you because of the coat?”

“No.”

“Then why won’t you wear it to school???”

And finally, the answer:
“We play dragons during recess and it makes my wings too fat.”

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His preschool teacher, being diligent and following policy, would make sure that each child wore their coat during recess. So if he brought it to school, he would have to wear it, and that was unacceptable (playing dragons was serious business).

So we sent him with two coats, the puffy one and his lighter jacket. Talked to his teacher about wearing the lighter jacket during dragon time and the puffy coat for non-dragon-time. Problem solved.

But never in a million years would we have figured that out on our own.

two children dressed for halloween, one as a green dragon and the other as a gold dragon — Being a dragon continued to be a priority for many years to come

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The design world seems awash with AI-this and AI-that, with Vibe Coding, Vibe Designing, and even Vibe Researching. (“Recruiting real people was hard, so we asked ChatGPT to pretend to be our ideal user!”)

Remember that your users are human beings who do things for all sorts of idiosyncratic reasons. If you’re not talking to them, understanding their context, and getting smarter about what they care about, you’re going to waste resources solving the wrong problems for the wrong reasons.

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You can find our work at www.purposeux.com, or sign up for our newsletter to get UX insights in your inbox, once per month.

Also I’m on bluesky now: https://bsky.app/profile/ejexpress.bsky.social

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