I sat down with @Helge Tennø to talk about why companies can’t just rely on surface-level “thin data” like clicks, conversions, or traffic.
Those numbers tell you what happened, but not why. Without insights into customer motivations and context, you risk chasing the wrong goals and mistaking activity for real impact.
Here’s the full interview:
Big Ideas:
Volume ≠ value → More dashboards don’t help if they’re the wrong signals
Ask why, not just what → “What problem are customers solving?” beats “Did they click?”
Experiments scale insight → Small online tests make thick data continuous, not just one-off
False confidence is dangerous → Channel metrics can create fake success when no one’s connecting
Thick data guides real strategy → Motivations, not assumptions, ground decisions
Helge argues it is not about bigger datasets. Thin data may give you volume, but thick data gives you value. With it, teams can see why people behave the way they do and design products that fit real lives.
His ideas line up so well with Glare: pairing thick data with UX metrics like comprehension, success, and sentiment helps explain not just what users do, but why. It turns numbers into actual customer value.
Discussion:
How is your team digging deeper into clicks and conversions? Do you have ways of bringing “why” data into your everyday product decisions?
Great stuff here @Bryan & @Helge! Loved the interview.
I’ve really enjoyed the emphasis of pairing the “why” data with UX metrics. Seems its allowed teams to bring validity to the next steps, vs trying to shape noise.
Thank you for the conversation and publication Bryan This was a great session discussing a very important issue that gets far to little attention today.
Thick (qualitative) data is critical to better design our experiences delivering value to the customer and capturing it back to the organization.
Thick data can be captured in real-time, continuously and at scale . if we design for it
Problem is that most teams don’t design for it. And I assume this is because they either: A. don’t know it’s possible or how easy it is .. or B. don’t get that the thick data is valuable because they’re not looking at the world through that lens (which has become an issue because we’ve fragmented our organizations and operationalized people into users.
Back in 2010-ish the customer was at the top / heart of the organization. The C-Suite was creating one shared strategy for the customer which gathered the entire organization around the same understanding of the same customer.
It was one thing that truly could align the organization around something they shared.
Since 2010 the customer has been operationalized. Pushed further and further down in the organization and out into every silo.
Today every silo has their own language and data to describe their own customers, even if they are talking about the same human, they wouldn’t know because they see and think about them differently.
In 2010 the customer was a unifying force, today the customer helps drive organizations and teams further apart.
The reason I used the term ‘user’ is because the term itself removes the person’s context. It gives the idea that someone is only there to ‘use’ something. Meaning we are not seeing the bigger picture (e.g. why?) are they there in the first place, what are they trying to achieve, which situation are they in, what behavior is the user supporting and what is the desired outcome? etc.
Anthropologist Rikke Ulk is quoted in the bok ‘why the world needs anthropologists’’ saying: "“It would be an act of mere reductionism to think of these people as mere users — as operators that need to be taken care of”.
To be fair I don’t think the term ‘customer’ is any better (it’s just a reference to a wallet with a human attached to it). At Merck we trained or commercial colleagues to talk about ‘situations’ and ‘needs’ instead of ‘customers’.
Honestly, love your explanation here Helge! I’m starting to get the gist of how words around the “who” are so important. And why tracking situations instead of user definitions actually helps skip to the juice or “thick data” in a sense.
It reminds me of how, in engineering, when framing stories, using the problem as the center of the story creates a more open-ended, leverageable, and powerful path to a potent solution instead of using the solution as the center point.
Love how you describe the C-Suite creating alignment around the term, and it shifting down into siloed understandings.
This explanation actually has me thinking about the way companies rebrand every few years, and how terms like customers, users, and user experience will need to rebranded to get back to the potency of the original intention behind the term.
Thanks for sharing Helge! So true that every team in an org has a different definition and understanding of the customer. Working with multiple orgs across multiple teams at the same time, we often see how differently one team can think about their end user versus another. And like @EricZ said, a company’s understanding needs to be internalized and updated every few years as their brand continues to evolve.
Discussion:
This was a great session discussing a very important issue that gets far to little attention today.
