We need to talk about Customer Understanding. Somewhere along the way, the standard advice in the WordPress ecosystem turned into “ask the user what they want and build it.” In 14 years of development I’ve watched that approach produce more bloated codebases and abandoned features than almost anything else. If you only code what the ticket says, you’re a transcriptionist, not an architect.
What people say they need and what they actually do are often far apart. To build something that sticks, you have to cross-check across the four levels of customer understanding, a framework popularized by Hannah Shamji. That means dropping the hunches and looking at what really happens, mess included.
Levels 1 and 2: what they say and feel
Most project managers live in Level 1. They look at NPS scores and survey results. That data is easy to collect and notoriously unreliable, because users explain their behavior through the lens of how they want to be seen. Asking a question directly is often the worst way to get a useful answer. People exaggerate, fixate on edge cases, and pick short-term hacks over long-term stability.
Level 2, the “think and feel” layer, is a bit better. Good user research and interviews help here, but memory bias still shapes the answers. I’ve had clients swear a checkout process was “fine” while their logs showed a 70% drop-off at the shipping selection hook. That’s why I keep saying that improving UX in legacy systems means looking at the data, not just the complaints.
Level 3: what they actually do (the developer’s part)
Here you stop listening and start watching. You study usage data, task analysis, and workflow efficiency. In technical terms, that means finding where users lose time or repeat actions. Watch for a user hovering without clicking, or clicking and then hitting the back button right away. Those are the real signs that the experience is broken.
I’d rather not force a “speak-aloud” protocol during testing, since it can be very disruptive, so I lean on silent observation. If you want better Customer Understanding, look at the telemetry. Here’s a simple way to hook into a frontend action and flag “hesitation” or repeated clicking with a bit of transient-style logic in JavaScript:
/**
* Tracking "Rage Clicks" or Hesitation
* A pragmatic way to see Level 3 behavior.
*/
document.querySelectorAll('.checkout-button').forEach(button => {
let clickCount = 0;
button.addEventListener('click', (e) => {
clickCount++;
if (clickCount > 3) {
console.warn('User is rage-clicking. Logic bottleneck detected.');
// Send to your analytics endpoint
bbioon_log_event('user_frustration', { element: 'checkout_btn' });
}
setTimeout(() => { clickCount = 0; }, 1000);
});
});Level 4: the why behind the behavior
The last level is about motivation. Why does a user skip the “Advanced Settings” tab every single time? Do they not need it, or are they afraid of breaking the site? Getting to that answer takes a relationship built on trust and long walkthroughs with the user. Once you’re there, you see emotions for what they are: signals. The job is to fix the pain point, and “empathizing” alone doesn’t do that.
Practical ways to get better insight
- Exposure Hours: Make sure every developer on your team spends 2 hours watching real customers struggle every few weeks.
- Helpdesk Insights: Read the support tickets. They’re full of Level 3 data.
- Co-design: Show users the raw features and let them rank them before you write a single line of PHP.
If this Customer Understanding work is eating your dev hours, I can take it on. I’ve been working with WordPress since the 4.x days, and I can tell a “nice-to-have” hunch from a fix that actually matters.
Final takeaway
Listening to surveys isn’t enough. You have to watch what people actually do and build the technical plumbing to capture it. Without that, a project is a pile of expensive hunches. So stop validating your assumptions and start diagnosing the real problems. For more on this, see how sustainable UX design is turning into a core performance metric.
