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If you design a system such that you cannot differentiate people from corporations and bots and that’s your defense for calling all of them “users”, you’ve designed a system that conflates people – who are mortal, have feelings, can feel pain and be hurt and who have human rights that must be protected – with the very entities that oftentimes exist to exploit them.
Design for people. Call them people. All else is secondary.
@aral This is an oldie, but I still like it
"If someone needs to be told to think and work in a human centered way when they are designing something, it should be a clear indication of how separated the discipline of design has become from what it is the design is being applied to."
@aral Hard agree. Design for people!
I don't love the term "Journey Mapping" (which I recently heard about at my organization) but it's a step in the right direction. It's got a focus on how humans feel during interactions - are they happy, frustrated, pleased, annoyed? It's a little weird to me that we have to label it and make it the "new hotness" to get folks interested, but however we can get the focus back on people is good with me.
@aral i really really love this. i was perusing your & your partners sites and am now intrigued. i have to spend a day looking into what y'all built with your foundation. i love the idea of web0. and i agree: everybody should have the ability to have a small static site. that used to be the case back in the wild west days of internet providers. with consolidation and monopoly, it was one of the first things to be disappeared. we need to legislate that back.
@blogdiva Thanks :)
And we can (and must) go beyond “static”. The Small Web vision is that people can have a dynamic site that can be (at least one of) their online identities. Protected by public-key encryption so that we can interact with each other privately (end-to-end encrypted) without Big Tech intermediaries and also be public as we please.
@aral I’m new to the tech field. I’ve never thought of or heard people refer to nonhuman users. Clients and customers, sure, but users always seemed like people. I’m in industrial robotics; maybe other fields are different?
@ThreeSigma @aral I’m sure I’ve heard Twitter accounts referred to collectively as “users” even though most are bots.
@theothersimo @aral I thought that was a fiction they were maintaining more than embracing the bots
So much this. Folks forget how much impact language has on our mindset. One word can change a lot.
In every project team I've run, and in all of my personal projects, I've locked out the term 'user' from any of our white papers or databases or code. They are players, or customers, or readers, or the thing that role is trying to accomplish.
I know you're speaking about design, but it's amazing how much even customer service improves just by recognizing the role is a human one.
@aral I’m sort of with you, but when I design something, I can’t think of all “people”, I have to think in terms of groups of “users”, because otherwise I would optimise for people that would never use my product. So I think “users” is a useful term.
The important thing is to not dehumanise the term. I would say that designers that are dehumanising their users are not really designers.
@aral YES! I fight against this constantly. There are so many other words we can use that are simultaneously specific to the problem domain and NOT de-humanizing. We should use them!