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).

A recent trend of discussion in Information Architecture shows our interest in communicating the value of IA clearly in terms that business will understand. Along these lines, the points of a venture capital blog post were raised about "search costs," leading naturally to the consideration of the usability costs of poorly design search interaction.

Search costs draws from (micro) economics, which offers useful concepts to understand the business decisions inherent in information design. While the economics concept of search cost has implications for reducing the cognitive demand of information users, it does not imply search usability. But there are useful intersections between these points of reference, a domain of cognitive economics and information use.

In information behavior research, we look at information economics and decision making. Attorneys, for example, face trade-offs among different search costs in locating the information required to support an argument. They consider drivers such as their billable time, the likelihood of success, and paying for a quick answer vs. the uncertain footwork (and search cost) to get the answer they need.

They face numerous psychic or psychological costs as well, such as dealing with changes in routine (not something they like to do), learning new computer tools in order to perform an essential task, changes in terms or language in working from new sources, etc. In my opinion, user experience research easily underestimates the real psychic costs required to change behavior in any habitual work practice. The benefits must vastly outweight the costs of change, and these costs are vague and variable from person to person.

Cognitive science also attempts to measure or at least represent the cognitive overhead of memory and cognitive load, which are different psychic "costs" than understood in the economic sense of the word.

In the economics of decision making, (simply put) Prospect Theory (Kahneman and Tversky, 1979) has shown how people undervalue probable, but less-risky outcomes and overvalue outcomes they consider more certain. Applying this principal to information findability explains behaviors we find in user research studies. For example, professionals often don't like to take the time to personalize information tools, preferring to use the tried-and-true. Personalization could be seen as leading to various unwanted outcomes, and lost time. A certain outcome based on known methods usually wins out for those billing by the hour.

In the same way, professionals don't look for alternative sources once "satisficing" their need (unless due diligence requires it), or use advanced search features - unless they run out of options. I've found this to be a strong working finding in many communities of practice.

Probably the course we should be taking as a discipline is learning more about transactional economics and the cognitive psychology of decision-making, applying that to information design decisions. We do that all the time based on heuristics, of course - we understand the inherent trade-offs people make when navigating large information sources. We provide quick navigational escape routes in expected locations (top-right); we trade-off powerful search interfaces (which librarians like) in favor of powerful browse interfaces (higher expected utility); we organize information by priorities which we evaluate across defined user communities. But we don't use economic terms to express these distinctions and their value, at least not consistently. That may be a useful direction to continue pursuing.

What follows draws from an ongoing discussion with other Local Ambassadors from the UXnet community. I'll just link these references for now ...

The discussion goes on about whether there's real energy for development in the community of practitioners known as user experience professionals. Some were saying, maybe the practices around UX are not all that:

User Experience is a Quality, Not A Discipline

One of the things that has been hard for the "usability community" to accept is that usability is not really interesting in and of itself. And that usability isn't really a goal, and it's definitely not the end-all be-all. Usability is simply a quality. It's an important quality, but just one of many. And it definitely doesn't warrant being a "discipline."

Since I'm a little new to this discussion, I'm not jumping in with both feet. Just linking sources.

Anyway, I disagree like others in the UXnet discussions, but for different reasons. I find it helpful when people surprise us with counter-proposals and critiques to keep things alive and interesting. I have had my own issues with the term UX design. I don't have a problem thinking of a field called UX - practitioners have the right to call their work, especially interdisciplinary work, anything they want to, as long as they agree it means something to them. And its nice when the expression communicates to their customers and even their parents and spouses, but not necessary.

But I don't see us (technically) as designing user experience, and I agree with those that also say there are not "elements" of user experience. (This is a very nice book though, I wish I had written it with a different title).

Experience isn't a thing or a quality, as Peter Merholz suggests, it’s a subjective, conscious activity. Experience cannot be observed either (as others have suggested). (Oh man, I should not have started on this blog - My second post and I've probably alienated Adaptive Path's principals and well-read authors forever!)

Experience is found in the mind and collective perceptions of the "user", or the experiencer. User Experience should be referred to as the user's experience, and this is not to make a twist of semantics. There is no experience "out there," its "in here." You can't design an experience, unless its your own. Instead of observing experience, user research should aim to understand experience. I submit you can design for a type of experience. But the artifacts of even a well-designed, entertaining product or attraction are designed materials, not designed experiences.

And I just as invitingly insert that we might continue to find alternative names for the people (users) having experience of interest. I know "experiencer" sounds weird, but it respects the subjective experience I'm interested in, as opposed to the mere fact of use. I'll probably keep looking for an alternative to user my whole career, and I have, like Diogenes. I'll let you when I find it.