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RSSI declare the "user" dead! Except there's one slight problem: I can't really tell you what a user is. The first thing that comes to mind is a person who abuses drugs, or perhaps one who engages in recreational usage of them. Or perhaps a selfish person who takes advantages of others. And that's exactly why I think the world's infatuation with the word must end in the vernacular of technology, marketing, media and the Web.
Josh Bernoff at Forester complains:
"When I started in the business 20-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 ... But you know what? All people are users now! (With nearly 80% Net penetration in the U.S. this is pretty close to true.) Users put up with computers. People just do stuff. Nobody talks about users of dishwashers or retail stores or telephones. So why are we talking about users of computers, browsers and software?"
< p>Amen. Let's just call people what they are: people. 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 and the Web -- everywhere, really.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 or my clients are developing. I can see complexity more easily focusing on people than I could the user."
As for the digital-media industry, we can start by cleansing ourselves of the term "user-generated content," or the more annoying acronym: UGC. Why? 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."
But my distaste for the word user mandates discussion of the commonly used word "consumer." Being that I work in the marketing and media-information industries, I am guilty of using that word a lot. (Note that I use the word, but am not a user of it.)
Many have called me on my usage with great disdain, and I can appreciate why. It's loaded, confusing to many, and is increasingly inaccurate in describing the people whom big marketers desire to build and maintain relationships with and sell stuff to.
Now, I don't love the word consumer, but feel stuck with it, at least for the short-term. Our industry is pragmatic in its usage. While it may be stylistically undesirable, consumer intuitively resonates -- offering just the right balance of specificity and ambiguity to enable the gears of our marketing, advertising and media operations to turn. Suddenly veering from it would distract us all from fulfilling our day-to-day mission of doing business, no matter where in the value chain we reside.
Long-term, we should probably adopt a new term and hierarchy, to reflect shifting markets, customer niches and the growing interactive nature of marketer-customer relationships. Until then, I think consumer will have to do.
But back to "user." I'm all for killing it right now. How about you?
RSS FEEDS
I'm with 'people'!
Everybody travels. Let's abolish "passenger".
Everybody learns. Let's abolish "student".
Everybody walks. Let's abolish "pedestrian".
Everybody sees a doctor. Let's abolish "patient".
Everybody reads. Let's abolish "reader".
Before you know it we'll have removed hundreds of nouns – but to what end?
Specialised terms have a purpose. We could replace all of these distinctions with "people", but "student" and "patient" and even "user" have implications that are distinctive and useful in specific contexts.
Can these terms carry negative connotations? Without question, but 1) these negatives aren't inherent, and 2) changing these terms to try to modify negative attitudes won't work. While I agree that "clueless users" isn't a helpful attitude, in what way is the term "clueless people" any better?
Sorry, Max. Not convinced.
UGC - They are not your friends. They are users.
When I'm talking generally about the people who do or may visit the site, then visitors, customers, members, etc. is fine.
The word user also helps emphasize the fact that usability is important on websites.
Perhaps when websites get to be as routine as reading a magazine (readers) or shopping (shoppers) our language will create another word (webbers?).
Until then, user is the best term we have.
Visitors sounds like people passing through town and users sounds demeaning. I never heard anyone who frequents the web called themselves a user, as in "I just used Google or YouTube".
Perhaps we have inherited a term from the early days of the medium that was borrowed from our tech colleagues and never took the time to correct it. If someone owned the internet, this rebranding would have happened a long time ago.
I vote for audience, new vs returning. It has the scope to include viewership, readership, and listenership, all of which audiences do on the web.
Marketing people are often inexperienced with web development, and yet picky with words they do know from the marketing training they have had.
When you say "customer" you must never forget the role of "prospect" since both have very different design considerations. Consumer works ok, but in some industries like pharma, its "patient" because there is a difference between a casual visitor and one that has the condition you are addressing. Consumer doesnt work. Consumer also has those odd connotations of someone eating your website.
"User" is the expectation from those marketing people because to them its now the word that means "this is the interactive part of the presentation".
"People" is so broad that it doesnt distinguish from internal people who go to the intranet vs. the visitors from the web or people who are logged in vs. people who are not.
Its a problem not unlike putting the search box at the top right of a screen and the logo at top left. There are good reasons these are the patterns now, but really its because of repetition and expectation on the part of the "consumer" that these conventions still exist. They dont have to.
"Users" has a bit of metadata attached in an unspoken way to mean the people actually engaged in the part of the site you are talking about, so this translates silently to "corporate users" when looking at the b to b extranet or "prospect users" when talking at the "about us" section and not the purchase path. It means a person who is also a role and is actually engaged in using the site in the way we design it. The bit about engagement is sometimes crucial in distinguishing from casual. We need to talk about people who are actually using what we make.
As a foundational word I have yet to feel, even in simple English terms, that "people" or "person" alone flows in a simple neutral way with the same connotations of engagment and role fulfillment that "user" does. I just have a hard time saying "Customer Person" or "patient people". We know they are all people, don't we? Its that extra bit of info we need, not the people part.
These days I say consumer, patient, prospect, client, administrator, registrant, purchasor, contributor, or other specific role description that helps clarify the conversation and get marketing team members to a precise understanding of what people are actually going to be "doing" in their website.
Words like "consumer" and "customer" are respectful enough, but in a whole lot of social settings the terms don't apply (since people aren't shopping and/or may not have bought in the past...they are simply socializing.) Words like target, captive, subject, lab-rat...speak for themselves. I sure wouldn't want to thought of that way.
I do like the movement toward thinking of people... like persuasion architecture or behavioral modeling, although those can be oversimplifications as well.
http://www.sysadminday.com/
Never liked the terms "user" or "consumer" myself. In marketing I try to use "Audience".
Heck, in 10 years will the term "friend" jump the shark??
Drug addicts Interactive Software users
I write an awful lot of training materials these days and since I cover online marketing technologies mostly the word 'consumer' has become the default. I also make a lot of references to 'learners' when I'm talking about online students. To me, both terms seem a lot more respectful than referring to a generic 'user'.
In the Web 2.0 world we can often think of sites as gathering places for people with similar interests. To that point, just as we probably wouldn't refer to people visiting our homes or businesses as 'users' we can better refer to site visitors as just that, 'visitors' or even 'guests'.
That sounds a bit more personable.