New technologies let us get almost instant customer feedback on anything. Human insight is the way we use that technology to make better, faster business decisions.

Imagine if you had a customer sitting next to you at work 24/7, eager to instantly answer any question or react to any idea. How much more productive would you be? How much more creative? How much more confident would you be in your decisions?

That’s what human insight is all about. It’s the use of crowdsourcing and online technology to get real-time insights on how your customers think and feel. The roots of human insight are in user experience research, but it has grown into a way to inform and improve any customer-facing decision or experience. For example, in a few hours, you can:

  • Validate the feature you’re building in the latest sprint
  • Check that a marketing message (or image or video) resonates with customers before you push it live
  • Understand customer attitudes and needs on any subject

But human insight is not just a technology. It’s a better way of making business decisions, focused on fast customer insight rather than random experimentation. Instead of guessing about customers and failing fast, you can learn directly from customers and increase your odds of succeeding on the first try. Human Insight breaks the tradeoff between speed and quality in business decision-making. Now you can optimize for both.

About the Center for Human Insight. We’re an online resource to help you use human insight for business decision-making. We’re passionate about the power of human insight to improve decisions and customer experiences in even the fastest agile businesses. We’ll show you:

  • Business problems you can solve with human insight
  • How to combine human insight with other data you get from your analytics, surveys, and other sources
  • How to deploy human insight in your organization, the speed bumps you’re likely to encounter along the way, and how to overcome them
  • Real-world stories about how human insight is used by managers and practitioners like yourself
  • Tips and best practices for getting the most insight from your studies

The Center is sponsored by UserTesting, but our mission isn’t tied to a single vendor. We want to help you use and deploy human insight regardless of supplier.

We publish articles and videos, and speak at webinars, conferences, and other venues. We welcome your comments and articles.

Photo by Eddi Aguirre on Unsplash

The opinions expressed in this publication are those of the authors. They do not necessarily reflect the opinions or views of UserTesting or its affiliates.