As a designer, I have no problem calling myself UX designer. Sure, “users”, whatever. We never lose sight of the fact that user is a human being and we are designing for other sensitive, diverse people.
User is an established term for a person in software, just like customer is a term for a person in commerce, or patient in hospitals. These are all humans and nobody is losing sight of that. No need to rebel against that just to express certain moral high ground.
I agree. I've always seen 'users' as simply a term for 'people who use my software'.
It's a bit like when a local airline here once spent millions in branding research, and started calling their passengers 'customers'. It was really odd to be sitting at the airport and hear the call "XYZ Airline would like to advise all customers on flight 123 that their aircraft is ready for boarding through gate 6"...
I always think of the term 'passenger' in more romantic terms, whereas 'customer' seems more mundane. FWIW, the airline seems to have dropped that branding now, and have reverted to calling their, ahem, passengers as 'passengers'.
In Sydney, the public transport trains refer to all of their passengers as "customers" as well.
Every single time I am referred to by that name over the PA it weirds me out. Maybe if this was a private system, but for public transport? Customer is just the wrong word.
A friend of mine once pointed out that "Only drug dealers and software companies call their customers users." I don't think he was attempting to disparage the practice and I don't sit on one side or the other with the term. I do think it's interesting though. Drugs and software and their usage are kind of similar in their human interaction. It's very personal with a short hop from the provider to consumer's brain.
Not too pick on PMs or MBAs, but everything described as "bad" here is terminology from those world, not UX design. Aside from the fact that UX literally has the word user in it, this is not the language I ever hear fellow designers use except when adopting business-oriented terms in business contexts. Most of the time those I talk to simply say "people." People looking for X, people trying to do Y.
This is sematic nitpicking while simply reiterating "human centered design" talking points.
There's nothing necessarily wrong here but it feels like standard Medium fluff.
I find that a lot of articles/talks by designers make such declarative statements... "Design for PEOPLE, not USERS!". Lots of time spent on semantics.
Even basic "user personas", however, attempt to capture the "not just a user" dimensions, and a decent business plan needs to answer questions like "What's in it for me? How is it better than <substitute x>?"
No, I think it's a reasonable statement. It's like brutalist architecture. It functions well as a building (It encloses a space, allows entry and exit, and the roof doesn't leak), but it's still a space that's inhuman. Cold. It would be a fine space for robots, but it's too sterile for humans to feel at home.
So the idea isn't inherently nonsense. (Any particular claims as to the right ways to apply it to software, on the other hand...)
Yes, and a lot of us marketers are scratching our heads when designers talk about "human-centric design" (i.e. making products by thinking about what people want, what marketers have been doing forever) as if it had really profound and new insights. But it's certainly a good approach so, it's worth promoting.
Marketing personas are often not aligned with UX personeas, not due to a mistake but due to the fact that the two functions operate in different domains
The customer for dog food is not the dog, for example
Marketing and UX Personas can be the same thing, the problem is that they are often defined for completely different touch points ( TV vs. Software) so the requirements are different and the results are different. Mostly this is confusing for everybody, an additional factor is that most UX teams know how to work with personas and how to develop them. But most ad agencies and marketing departments don’t. This makes their personas often rather weird and unhelpful. It’s often a target group personified ( the whole target group).
Indeed, the primary criterion in dog food design is smell and consistency of output. #2 is cost — how can you tweak ingredients as to legally be allowed to label it “lamb dinner” at lowest cost
The goal is different though. In marketing the goal is "convince them to buy" or simply "get eyeballs." It's almost hostile to the users at times.
The goal of UX is to help them get something done and make them happy. So while the techniques may share ground, the intent is completely different (and new).
Cmon, the goal of UX is not to make anyone “happy”, it’s to get people to be satisfied so that they come back and spend more money. You can justify what you do any way you like, let it feel good, but don’t try to pretend you are not just a cog in the machine.
I’m on board. I’m a designer - and I don’t think about “users.” I think about people using these instruments. The difference, in my experience, is profound: I’m connecting with a complex, amorphous process rather than a mistakenly defined unit.
It comes down to accuracy. “People using xyz” is simply more descriptive than the shorthand.
At the same time, it CAN be useful to mistakenly define an element in a system for the sake of making it usable. That’s where “user” comes in - it’s a simple enough concept to make it fit into frameworks. But please, please... be aware that it is indeed akin to shorthand.
Hey everyone, this is Jo, the author of this article – AMA. Just kidding, really appreciate the discourse happening here, reading every single one of your comments.
A question for the UX designers in here: Do you think about what your users do when they don’t use your product? What tools/models do you use for that? Very curious for your feedback!
If you go around calling users "humans", people will think you are an android (lower-case), robot, or space alien; or somebody who believes they are one of those.
Despite the unnecessary beef with the term “user”, the author seems to sugarcoat the only metric that matters at the end of the day - $$$. All of these altruistic reasons designers and app creators claim will help their users is just another way of saying we need more $$$. Let’s be real for a minute and admit that our job as UX designers is to figure out how to squeeze more $$$ out of users.
User is an established term for a person in software, just like customer is a term for a person in commerce, or patient in hospitals. These are all humans and nobody is losing sight of that. No need to rebel against that just to express certain moral high ground.