The term user is way over used. Who is a user anyway? One who abuses drugs? A selfish person who takes advantages of others? I’m surprised at how many people are commenting lately on eradicating the word user and just calling people what they are: people. Sometimes it seems we use more acronyms and buzzwords than is healthy. The problem is that inaccurate buzzwords and overused vernacular, like users, distance us from our true intentions and interactions with customers and each other—not just in technology, but in marketing, media, advertising, the Web, and everywhere.
John Udell from Microsoft, while previously at IDG, last year explained:
Everything about this buzzphrase annoys me. First, calling people “users” is pernicious. It distances and dehumanizes, and should be stricken from the IT vocabulary (see Those clueless users), as well as from the publishing vocabulary. IT has customers and clients, not users. IT-oriented publishers have readers, not users.
Thomas Vander Wal, a blogger and principal at Infocloud Solutions, eradicated the word from his lexicon and noted:
One benefit that came from focusing on the person and not the user has been being able to easily see that people have different desired uses and reuses for the data, information, media, etc. for the products I am working on…. I can see complexity more easily focusing on people than I could the user.
Josh Bernoff at Forester says:
When I started in the business twenty-mumble years ago, writing software manuals, people who used software were unusual (and had to be masochists). We spent a lot of time talking about users. The word user was helpful — it helped us to keep in mind that there was a poor slob on the other end of what we were building.
Those times are long gone. We know users are important now. Disappoint them and you lose. So why do we still have to call them “users,” which puts the emphasis on the technology they are using?
Yes, I know “users are people, too.” But you know what? All people are users now! (With nearly 80% Net penetration in the US this is pretty close to true.) Users put up with computers. People just do stuff.
Nobody talks about users of dishwashers, or users of retail stores, or users of telephones. So why are we talking about “users” of computers, browsers, and software?
Try, just for a day, to stop using this word. You’ll be amazed at how differently you think about the world.
Web users become people looking for information.
Application users become employees trying to get stuff done.
Users of your Web site become customers. (Forrester’s group focused on usability of Web sites and other technologies is called the Customer Experience team. I like that.)
User-generated media becomes amateur media.
And most importantly, social media users become people connecting with other people. Once you think about it that way it becomes a lot easier to understand. And it focuses you on the relationships, which will always be around, not the technologies, which are always changing.
It’s amazing (to me) the clarity this brings to writing, and to thinking. Words matter.
Jimmy Guterman took the pledge to stop talking about users at O’Reilly. Way to go, Jimmy. So now you take the pledge….I promise to avoid the word user whenever possible. I will think of people who use technology as people, customers, and friends. I won’t use them, and they won’t use me.
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