Be Your Customer — sometimes called the 'mystery shopper' method in service design — asks researchers and designers to experience their own product or service as a paying customer, from initial discovery through to purchase, use, and aftercare. By walking the full customer journey in the customer's shoes, teams routinely discover gaps, friction points, and inconsistencies that internal familiarity had rendered invisible. It is one of the most direct and humbling forms of design research available.
What It Is
A 'Be Your Customer' session involves a team member going through the full product or service experience from scratch, with no insider knowledge or shortcuts applied. They sign up as a new user, make a purchase, contact customer support with a real question, wait for a delivery, or navigate an onboarding flow — and document every interaction, emotion, and friction point along the way. The output is a first-person account of the customer experience as it actually exists today.
How to Run It
- Create a new account or approach the service as a genuinely new customer — use no insider access or shortcuts.
- Document every touchpoint: screenshots, photographs, audio notes, and real-time journal entries.
- Note every moment of confusion, frustration, delight, or unexpected effort.
- Time yourself at each step — how long does it actually take?
- Rate the emotional quality of each touchpoint on a simple high-medium-low scale.
- Debrief with the team and compare observations with any existing journey mapping data.
Organisations that regularly experience their own product as customers consistently outperform those that rely solely on research reports.
When to Use It
Be Your Customer is most valuable as a regular team practice — quarterly at minimum — for any team responsible for a live product or service. It is particularly powerful immediately before a research sprint, to sharpen hypotheses and identify the moments most worth investigating with real users. It is also an excellent onboarding exercise for new team members.
Tips for Success
- Use a genuinely fresh account or persona — the insider shortcut problem is real and corrupts the findings.
- Involve people from across the organisation, not just the design team — the most illuminating observations often come from those furthest from the product day-to-day.
- Focus particularly on the first five minutes of a new user experience: first impressions are disproportionately important.
- Action the most critical findings immediately rather than filing them for the next sprint.
