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How to enter the mind of your customer: A two-step guide

Top Tip: Nobody cares about you (or your product)

Guy Thornbury-Phillips
UX Collective
5 min readSep 3, 2020

A model brain glowing red against a blue background.
Photo by Natasha Connell on Unsplash

Working with startups has made me realise something. All of them wear rose-coloured spectacles and think their product is ‘innovative’, ‘disruptive’ and ‘the future’.

That’s all well and good but to be successful, you need to separate yourself from the dreamland.

Your customers are the people who use your product. They don’t care if you’re ‘breaking boundaries in the tech space’. They just want to use your product and receive value. Otherwise, their 20-second attention spans will remove all memory of it.

Today I’m going to show you how to properly enter the mind of your customer. The first step is to buy a mind-reader device, like the one from Men In Black, and walk down Oxford Street scanning everyone you see.

If only it was that simple…

In an attempt to simplify things, I’ve created a two-step guide to achieve the title of ‘Mind Reader’.

If you follow these steps, anything you create in the future will be designed for your customer. Not for you (because that would be selfish). Your customers will feel like you know them, even before they’ve met you or your brand.

Published in UX Collective

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Written by Guy Thornbury-Phillips

The Write Guy: guiding your writing to near-perfection. Topics: Writing Tips • Marketing • Life Lessons. Sign up to The Write Newsletter: https://bit.ly/2Hnm6vH

Responses (2)

What are your thoughts?

Focus on the problem instead of the solution is vital, and it is definitely a matter of empathy.
It's also a matter of business. Companies don't set aside budgets for solutions. Solutions have no inherit value. Instead, companies have budgets to fix…

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I think you’ve got minimalism a bit wrong. But great post!

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