Early in the design process, designers focus on understanding the individual user. Customer service logs and web analytics data are often readily available, whereas other research requires planning, execution, and analysis. This is true for most design projects, with the exception of new companies or brand-new products, where a previous history is not available.

Service logs are records of individual instances that expose interaction issues. Aggregation of these records provides a high level understanding of how many issues are associated with a particular feature or task. Similarly, web logs reveal hotspots of interaction difficulty. Designers figure out ways to reduce the issues by eliminating the problem that caused it by tweaking the design.