Design / Redesign

A while ago Dan Gillmor posted a discussion on Dave Farber's IP list about users and who they are, what we call them, and how we refer to ourselves. One brief quote of his:

“I tend to say that I'm a customer, not a consumer. Customers are not simply eating what's on the table and sending money back to the companies that provide it. Customers are participants, first, in a negotiation or conversation with sellers. Yet "customer" doesn't fully capture what we are in today's economy, either. It's a hard word, too limited, as is "user" or other words that acknowledge the increasingly complicated relationships between sellers and buyers (even when no money is being exchanged) in the InternetAge.”

So why must we continue to call the people who adopt and interact with information products users? Certainly individuals do not consider themselves to be “users.” We normally consider ourselves in terms of our work or professional identities, so we might identify with professional, designer, researcher, even employee. But the term user seems like a kind of objectification that simplifies the technologists’ need to easily classify the using customer. It seems a parallel entity to the experimentalist’s outmoded term “subject,” once authoritative and clinical, now seen as somewhat condescending and politically inappropriate. More importantly, the term can obscure the very points we once invoked it to make. If we advocate for “the user,” shouldn’t we at least respect them enough to speak of them as real people with real jobs?

This line of empathy goes very much against the points made by those at Passionate Users, a lovely collective blog/site that argues for offering pleasure, joy, and experience to people using products we ostensibly design. Maybe they design for the broader market - I design for information intensive work practices. My users are almost always professionals, and almost never consumers.

So who are we really talking about here? The spread of information technology into the workplace brought the term “user” into business parlance. Before office workers used computers (or terminals) the term user was not used – people were employees, managers, line workers – but not users. As management information systems (MIS) expanded usage in the 1980’s, the term “user” diffused into broader usage.

As PC computing and MIS grew in the 1980’s, technology professionals promoted the variant “end user.” Originally end user was used to distinguish between a “real user” and a manager or other “user representative.” User representative was a job title in AT&T’s huge long-distance management group for many years. Eventually this expression seemed to draw too many bad jokes, along with its attempt to distinguish “what type of user.”

Our profession has not helped much. Ostensibly, as user experience and design professionals we are quite concerned with the state of the “real user.” We have been trained and traditionally have acted to represent the “user’s” interests and needs, advocating to both development engineers and managers. We have institutionalized user as term of art, a convenient shorthand for enabling organizational discourse and problem-solving.

Consider how the seminal articles and books in HCI promoted the term user, without any question of its propriety. At the first ACM CHI conference (1983), nearly every paper adopts the term, with a significant adoption of “user centered” and even the start of “user friendly.” SIG CHI itself advocated a focus on “user behavior” and the “end user.”

For maybe a dozen years, it also seemed to me a sufficient identifier in the fast-paced world of software development, where adopting too many arcane reference points quickly puts one out of favor with developers or uninformed project managers. “User” was modest and clear – we aimed to forge consensus about the user needs, user requirements, user satisfaction. “User” helped us win that consensus.

In many organizations, the abstraction of “the user” was the best we could do anyway, since marketing and sales owned the “customer.” It has taken our profession well over a decade to gain sufficient credibility to also represent “customers” without incurring the wrath of other internal customer-facing groups, who often consider the customer relationship a source of authority or mandate. There are politics in language choice, and I’ve often seen the invocation of “the user” change a roomful of disagreement over design and requirements.

After all these years, this should be a done deal. But there's always more to say about this! I say its not done, yet! (More later).