On the use of “user”

Elyse Sanchez, Monday, July 30, 2007 @ 11:40 am

“I’m sick of users,” announced Josh Bernoff in
a recent blog entry, leading one to initially believe that he has joined the
ranks of indifferent (or outright hostile) developers, clients, and other uninterested
parties reluctantly associated with producing applications and websites. However,
Bernoff’s distaste is semantic, not social. He argues that the term “user”
emphasizes technology over relationships and encourages a flattened and skewed
view of the people interacting with the products. He challenges the readers to “try,
just for a day, to stop using this word. You’ll be amazed at how differently
you think about the world.”

Unsurprisingly,
Bernoff’s modest proposal unleashed a torrent of unfavorable comments and
accusations that the substitution of more contextually specific appellations such
as “people,” “customers,” or “employees” was an attempt to fix something that
isn’t broken. A few readers were quick to brandish the smackdown stick of a
failed attempt at elaborate political correctness in Bernoff’s suggestion. And
of course, the old joke that only drug dealers and IT professionals refer to
their constituency as “users” was brought up (twice, in fact).

I agree with the
commentators who stated that “user” is a well-understood term, not
intentionally pejorative, and is, in fact, hard to replace without awkwardness
or lack of precision. My one objection regards the use of the term when
referring to usability testing. Often referred to as “user testing,” here the
term—perhaps unintentionally, but surely—puts the focus of evaluation on the
participant and not the system. I even prefer taking the term “testing” out of
the equation, instead calling the process “usability assessment.” I’ve dealt
with too many participants suffering performance anxiety and brightly uttered
the set piece that “we’re evaluating the system, not you” far too many times.
Of course, I’m not advocating that we keep the user out of the assessment, but
instead focus on the point of the activity. This is probably the one scenario
where people are directly and personally exposed to the term “user,” which is
almost exclusively used internally in design and development teams. Although we’re
all users, we are so in the third person only.

user experience design

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