Your Users Are Lying to You

TL;DR: The intention-behavior gap means people often mean what they say and still do something else. Research captures intentions in a calm moment, but your product meets users later, in real life, where friction and habit usually win.

Users will often tell you the truth and still do something else later. They sit across from you and say they would use it every day. They say they need this. They say the current solution is broken and yours would fix it. Then they go back to their lives and do something else.

I have heard versions of this in research sessions for years. A user says yes and means it. Designers leave the room feeling good. Then the product meets daily life and gets hit by routine, low energy, and plain old forgetfulness.

The mistake is treating that first yes like evidence. Designers build for the promise instead of the moment when the choice actually has to happen. When you ask someone what they want, what they need, or what they will do, you get a plan for later. You do not get the part where the week gets busy and they drop it.

I have made this mistake too. The interview sounds solid in the room. A week later, life looks different.

The gap is real

Psychologists have been studying this gap for decades, and the result keeps coming back: people often fail to do the thing they said they would do.

Paschal Sheeran at the University of North Carolina ran a large review of earlier research, covering 422 separate studies. He found that across research on exercise, condom use, cancer screening, and other health behaviors, the median proportion of people with positive intentions who still failed to perform the behavior was 47 percent. Nearly half said yes and still did not do it.

That number comes from health research, but the gap is not limited to health. Sheeran and Webb , writing in 2016, found that even when intention changed a lot, behavior changed much less. I keep coming back to that because designers still grab onto stated intent as if it settled the matter. It does not.

The setting explains a lot. Intentions form in calm conditions: a quiet room, a future-facing mindset, no friction, no competing demands. Action happens later, when someone is tired, distracted, late, or juggling five other things.

The person in your interview may be honest. That still tells you very little about the version of them who opens your app at 10pm after a long day.

Research can make users look more committed

There is a second problem. When people answer questions in research, they are also managing how they come across.

Social desirability bias is the tendency to give answers that make people look better than they are. It’s not deliberate dishonesty. It is the social pressure that shows up when someone knows they are being watched and judged, even when the researcher says the session is anonymous. The person sitting across from you does not want to look like someone who gives up on a new habit after a week. So they talk about the version of themselves they want to be.

Users are not trying to fool you. Most are doing what all of us do. They describe the better version of themselves and mistake that for a prediction. I have done that too.

Put those two things together and you get a picture of a user who is more disciplined and more motivated than the real one. The bias usually points in the same direction. Users say they will do more than they end up doing.

Jawbone ran into real behavior

In 2011, Jawbone launched the UP wristband. The pitch was simple: wear it, track your steps and sleep, and build better habits. It sounded right because it matched what people said they wanted. Be more active. Sleep better. Stay on track. Sales were strong in the first year.

Endeavour Partners published research in 2014 showing that more than half of Americans who had ever owned a modern activity tracker no longer used it, and a third had abandoned theirs within six months of buying it. Jawbone stopped producing fitness trackers, and the company filed for liquidation in July 2017.

The problem was not that people lied about wanting better habits. They wanted the version of themselves that exercised more, slept better, and stayed on track. But wanting a habit is easier than building one, and a product built around that wish eventually runs into real behavior. The same pattern shows up in other products all the time. People download the app and never open it again. They say they will pay later and never do. Designers spend months on a feature that barely gets touched because the real next step was opening the app again on Thursday night. At this point, that is just part of the job.

Check what people really do

Keep doing user research, but stop treating stated intent like hard evidence. It is a signal, nothing more. When a user says they will do something, test that before you build around it. This does not require a big experiment. Use a prototype, run a short trial, or ask for a small step that costs the user something real. Signing up for a waitlist is easy. Paying is harder. Coming back three days in a row is harder still. That kind of effort tells you more than a nice answer in an interview because it shows what happens when real life gets involved.

And when you cannot run a behavioral test, run a friction audit. Before you build for a stated need, spend twenty minutes listing what could stop the action from happening: time, habit, setup, other priorities, lack of skill. If the list gets long, the stated intention is weak. Ask different questions too. Do not ask only what someone wants. Ask what they tried before, what got in the way, why they stopped, and what happened the last time they tried to fix this. Past behavior is still messy, but it tells you more than a promise about the future because it already made it through ordinary life once.

Your user told you they would open the app every morning, and they probably meant it. But 2pm in a research session is not 7am when the alarm goes off. Build for that version of the user instead: tired, busy, running late, and only trying a little. If it works there, you might have something.