Behavior or process observation

Watch what people actually do or how the process actually runs, instead of relying on reports about it.

You rewrote your client onboarding guide last month. On calls, every client says it's clear. Yet the same three questions keep landing in your inbox each week, and you can't tell whether the guide fails somewhere specific or whether nobody actually opens it. What people tell you and what the email record hints at are pointing in different directions, and you keep guessing.

The move is to watch what people actually do instead of relying on reports about it. The cue is any gap between what people say and what the traces suggest. Run it in three steps: get consent to observe (ask a new client to share their screen and walk the guide while you stay silent), note exactly where they stall, skip ahead, or invent workarounds, and trace the handoff itself (who sends the guide, when, buried in which email). When it works, a vague complaint like "confusing" turns into a specific finding, such as nobody scrolling past the pricing table, which you can fix in an afternoon. Don't use it when you lack consent to watch, or when being observed would distort the behavior so much that the observation tells you nothing.