Your Users Are Lying to You (And It’s Not Their Fault)

Welcome to The Drafts, a podcast about building a business while working full-time with honesty, no highlight reels.In this episode, I'm talking about something every builder eventually runs into: you talk to your users, you feel validated, you build the thing, and then nobody uses it. Not because your idea was bad. Because the way we're taught to do research is fundamentally broken.You'll hear:Why your users are lying to you, and why it's not their fault (the intention-behaviour gap and what Daniel Kahneman's planning fallacy has to do with your last failed feature)What social desirability bias actually looks like from the inside, and why the person across from you in a user interview is performing, not reportingThe University of Massachusetts research on everyday lying, and how gender shapes the specific ways people distort their answers in evaluative settingsWhy even your most honest, well-intentioned users genuinely cannot tell you what to build (and what cognitive anchoring has to do with "faster horses")The real Henry Ford quote, and why the fake one has been used to justify skipping research entirelyThe Hawthorne Effect: why observed behaviour is not real behaviour, and why your usability test results might be lying to you tooWhy frictionless design has never mattered more, and what it means that users will close your tab the moment it asks them to try harderThe exact question types to retire, and the past-behaviour questions that actually surface real signalHow Maya, a UX researcher building a task management tool, made every single one of these mistakes before she figured out what to ask insteadWhy I made the same mistakes building Arro, and what it taught me about what good research actually requiresIf you've ever walked away from a round of user interviews feeling validated, only to ship something nobody used, this episode is for you.Stop asking people to predict the future. Ask them to describe the past. That's where the truth is.Full show notes and resources are available at thedraftspodcast.substack.comMusic in this episode: "The Drafts Theme" by Madhumita PrasadDisclaimer: The content of this episode is for educational and informational purposes only and represents the personal opinions of the host. All references to specific studies, researchers, or published works are cited for educational and analytical purposes. The views expressed here are solely those of the host and do not reflect the views or policies of any current or former employers, clients, or affiliated organizations.