You Are Not Your User

In the 1970s, Boeing had a problem. Pilots kept making fatal errors in the cockpit. They were flipping the wrong switch, pulling the wrong lever, or misreading critical gauges. The planes themselves were fine, and the pilots were well-trained. But people kept dying.

Boeing’s engineers were baffled. The cockpit layout made perfect sense to them. Every control was exactly where it should be, organized by system. Hydraulics were in one place, electrical in another, flight controls in the middle. It was logical, elegant, and obvious.

Unfortunately, Boeing’s engineers weren’t the ones flying the planes.

When they finally put pilots in simulators and watched what actually happened, they discovered something uncomfortable: the cockpit made perfect sense to engineers, and almost no sense to pilots.

The engineers grouped the controls by system (hydraulics, electrical, flight controls, etc). Pilots, on the other hand, needed controls grouped by function, even if they belonged to different systems. When they landed a plane, they weren’t thinking, “I need to adjust the hydraulic system, then the electrical system, then the mechanical system.” They were thinking “we’re landing” and needed everything for landing grouped together.

The problem, in essence, was that the engineers had designed the cockpit for other engineers.

Now, as you may have guessed, this isn’t really about Boeing or cockpits. It’s about a quirk of human psychology. The more you know about something, the harder it becomes to remember what it’s like to know nothing about it.

Psychologists call it “the curse of knowledge.” You might call it expert blindness. Either way, it’s everywhere. (And boy, is it ever in your marketing and communications.)

It’s the reason why doctors can’t explain diagnoses in plain English. Why tax experts write codes that no normal person can parse. Or why tech support tells you to “clear your cache” as if everyone knows what a cache is or where to find it.

In other words, the person closest to the problem is often the worst at explaining it to everyone else.

If you need further proof of this, choose any nonprofit or healthcare organization and look at their website.

The navigation is organized like an organizational chart: About, Programs, Services, Resources, Impact, Get Involved. It makes perfect sense if you work there. You know that “Community Wellness Initiative” is the addiction treatment program. You know that “Resources” is where eligibility information lives. You know that the information people actually need is buried three clicks deep under “Services.”

Your users, on the other hand, don’t know any of this.

They arrive with a problem, a question, or a need. They’re thinking: “Can you help my dad?” or “Do you take my insurance?” or “How do I donate to that thing I saw on the news?” They’re not thinking about your org chart.

Instead, here’s what actually happens:

A mother searches for help for her son’s addiction. She lands on your homepage. She sees “Programs,” “Community Wellness Initiative,” “Resources,” “Impact.” She doesn’t see “addiction treatment” anywhere obvious. She clicks around for thirty seconds and leaves.

You just lost someone you could have helped, not because you couldn’t help them, but because you organized your website the way you organize your Monday morning staff meeting. You spoke in your language instead of hers.

This isn’t malicious, it’s just inevitable. You live inside your organization forty hours a week. You know what everything means. You know how the pieces fit together. You know which program does what and why it’s called that and where it lives in the navigation.

So when someone suggests reorganizing the website, you gather your team. You whiteboard the navigation. You debate whether “Get Help” or “Services” is clearer. You move things around. You launch the new structure.

It still isn’t going to work.

Because you’re still insiders trying to imagine what it’s like to be an outsider. You just can’t. It’s like trying to remember what it felt like before you learned to read. Once you know something, you can’t unknow it.

Six insiders in a conference room will create something that makes perfect sense to six insiders. They’ll validate each other’s logic and convince themselves it’s clear. They’ll all be wrong in the exact same way.

The fix isn’t reorganizing your site again with a different group of insiders. It’s admitting you can’t trust your own judgment.

When Boeing wanted to reduce cockpit errors, they didn’t ask engineers to think harder about pilot needs. They put pilots in the simulator and watched where they struggled. They measured the gap between the logic of their experts and people’s real behavior in the wild.

That’s not overthinking it. That’s humility and honesty.

If you want to fix your website, you need to watch someone who doesn’t work at your organization try to use it. Not a board member or your spouse. They need to be actual users. People who don’t know your program names, your organizational structure, or your internal logic.

Watch them get confused, click the wrong thing, and give up.

It’s uncomfortable. You’ll want to interrupt and explain, but don’t. The fact that you need to explain is the problem.

Every time an expert creates something for non-experts, there’s a gap. The expert sees connections and shortcuts that don’t exist for anyone else. The gap isn’t malicious, but it is inevitable.

The question isn’t whether the gap exists. It’s whether you’re willing to measure it.

(And if you’d like help with that, see Brooks Digital’s Website Strategy Assessment.)