FOUR LEVELS OF CUSTOMER UNDERSTANDING

Summary from the TLDR Design newsletter

Truly understanding customers requires going beyond surveys and self-reported data, which are unreliable — people's words, thoughts, feelings, and actions rarely align. Hannah Shamji's four-level framework pushes teams to study actual behavior and underlying motivations, rather than settling for surface-level feedback. Building sincere user relationships and observing real workflows is what separates genuine research from expensive guesswork.