Skip to main content
There’s a limit to what you can learn by watching and asking. At some point, the fastest way to understand your user’s experience is to become them - to actually do the job they’re trying to do, with the tools they have, under the constraints they face. User simulation is the practice of a product team member (usually the PM or designer) using the product exactly as a real customer would - completing real tasks, with real data, in real conditions 👟

​
What it involves

This goes beyond a quick click-through of your own product. Real user simulation means:
  • Setting up a fresh account as a new user, not an internal test account with special permissions
  • Completing the actual tasks your users need to do - onboarding, the core workflow, edge cases
  • Using only the information a new user would have (no internal knowledge, no shortcuts)
  • Doing it on the devices and connection speeds your users actually use
The discomfort you feel is the data. Every moment of confusion, every “wait, how do I do this?”, every workaround you invent - that’s your user’s daily experience 😬

​
Why it works

Customer interviews tell you what users say. Usage data tells you what users do in aggregate. User simulation tells you what it actually feels like - the friction, the confusion, the small frustrations that never make it into a support ticket but quietly drive churn. It also builds empathy in a way that secondhand research can’t. An engineer who has personally struggled through your onboarding flow makes different decisions in a sprint than one who’s only seen a screenshot of it.

​
The fresh eyes problem

The biggest risk is that you know too much. Internal knowledge makes you blind to friction that a real user would hit immediately - you instinctively navigate around problems without registering them. A few ways to counter this:
  • Do it with a genuinely new team member - their onboarding experience is real user simulation by default
  • Use a fresh account on a different browser - removes any cached state or internal shortcuts
  • Ask someone outside the team - a colleague from a different function who’s never used the product is a proxy user with fresh eyes

​
Pairing with other techniques

User simulation is a complement to, not a replacement for, customer interviews and usability testing. It’s fast, cheap, and can be done any time - use it to generate hypotheses, then validate them with real users. Lesson learned: I’ve never done a proper user simulation without finding at least three things I wanted to fix immediately. It’s uncomfortable. That’s exactly why most teams avoid it 👀