You Are Not Your User.

Dear younger me,

You’re going to think you understand users better than you do.

Part of that is empathy. Part of it is confidence. Part of it is the simple fact that you’re a user too. You click things. You struggle with bad interfaces. You have opinions. All of that feels like evidence.

It isn’t.

Here’s the part that took longer to learn: you are not your user. Not demographically. Not cognitively. Not situationally. And the more fluent you become in design, the less representative you are by default.

At first, this won’t be obvious. You’ll make reasonable assumptions. You’ll say things like “most people would probably…” and mean it sincerely. Sometimes you’ll even be right. That’s what makes this tricky.

The danger isn’t empathy. It’s projection.

This matters because design work rewards internal coherence. If something makes sense to you and your peers, it feels solid. Alignment comes quickly. Confidence follows. Meanwhile, real users are dealing with constraints you don’t feel anymore. Different pressures. Different stakes. Different mental load.

AI makes this easier to miss.

It can generate personas that sound plausible. Summaries that feel grounded. Explanations that line up neatly with what you already believe. None of that guarantees contact with reality. It just makes distance harder to notice.

You’ll see this pattern repeat. Teams will talk convincingly about users they haven’t seen in a while. Assumptions will age without anyone marking the passage of time. Insight will slowly turn into lore.

If you don’t learn to separate lived evidence from internal consensus, the consequences show up late. Products drift toward designer logic. Friction accumulates quietly. When problems surface, they feel surprising even though they’ve been forming for a while.

So notice where your understanding comes from.

Did it come from watching someone struggle? From hearing hesitation in their voice? From seeing where they paused, retraced, or gave up? Or did it come from synthesis that felt right because it fit the story you already had?

One of those keeps you honest. The other keeps you comfortable.

From the future,

Me