Has ‘User’ Become An Outdated Term?
By Steve McCarthy
I’ve been fortunate in my career to-date to have worked across a wide range of digital technologies, providing user experience (UX) guidance through research and strategy for websites, mobile apps, wearable apps, ebooks, and, more recently, virtual reality (VR).
Usually the output of said guidance takes the form of a carefully constructed document containing analysis of the current state of play and recommendations for improvement. And inevitably, when dealing with user experience, my documents need to reference the user(s) themselves, whose behaviour we are trying to influence and whose needs and goals we are designing for.
More often than not the word ‘user’ is sufficient in describing the individual and their expected actions, but frequently — as digital experiences begin to transcend multiple technologies in the transmedia worlds in which we live — I find that the word isn’t the all-encompassing designation we need it to be and it can often be tempting to replace it with a more suitable alternative to match a given context.
For example, I recently carried out research into the ebook industry. When writing up my findings I couldn’t help but feel that the word ‘user’ was creating an inaccurate representation of the experience that was taking place between the technology and the person experiencing it. ‘User’ suggested far more interaction and physical engagement than I felt was — in reality — taking place. Anyone who has used an e-reader will know that after launching their ebook of choice there is limited further physical activity beyond scrolling and swiping. The main activity that follows is cognitive through the absorption of the reading material, also known as ‘reading’. ‘Reader(s)’, therefore, felt like a much more appropriate term to describe the users in this scenario.
Another example is how best to describe a person who is participating in a VR experience. Unlike the ebook scenario, a VR experience can demand varying degrees of interactivity from the participant. A high-end VR experience is likely to involve controllers where the user could be considered a ‘player’, but in contrast the low-end experiences — the likes of Google Cardboard — normally just involve placing a device in a headset and hitting play. From there on out the engaged participant becomes a ‘viewer’ controlling the viewing experience.
Arguably, in both the two examples above the technology is still being used by the person on some level and, although the term ‘user’ may not be the most suitable, I can appreciate its convenience. But what about digital experiences where the person doesn’t ‘use’ the technology?
What about experiential activity? Like a pop-up stand in a shopping mall where a brand ambassador catches your eye during your shopping trip and invites you over to take a closer look at the latest Toyota model, and at the same time captures your email address on their tablet app so that they can send you a digital brochure. Here the ‘use’ of the technology is happening through a proxy, but for the shopper it is still a digital experience.
What about the emergence of smart advertising, where a person walking down the street is targeted by an adboard that, using cameras, can sense the gender and approximate age of the person and deliver personalised marketing content? In this scenario the person in the experience is passive, so the term ‘user, which implies active participation doesn’t fit the bill.
For me, the long term relevance of the word ‘user’ will be determined by how user experience professions develop. For the moment the phrase ‘user experience’ is largely confined to the digital world and in particular the design of the interfaces that we interact with.
In contrast customer experience (CX) — the management of customers through to purchase of a product and the relationship they have with a company during and thereafter — has been around for much longer. CX is forced to consider people and their behaviour in the real world. But as the digital and the real worlds become ever more blurred can we really afford to consider people, customers, users, in such isolated ways? Surely the development of any new product or service should be considering the user/customer’s experience across all mediums and devices, real and digital? Surely designing a customer experience is the same, or shares vast similarities with, designing a user experience?
Finally, further consideration should be taken as to the cultural connotations of the word ‘user’. There was a brief period where my colleagues and I dabbled with the word ‘actor’ when dealing with our U.S clients, for fear that the drug abuse connotations of the word ‘user’ could detract from the great UX work we were producing for them.
Reader, viewer, participant, consumer, customer, player, user; it’s not for me to decide which word should be used moving forward. That is for my peers to determine and for a consensus to organically emerge over a period of time. What I can say for certain is that the term ‘user’ is outdated and is unlikely to last as we move towards an evermore integrated digital world.
If I was to be so bold as to offer any alternative I would lean on the advice of Donald Hoffman, Professor of Cognitive Science at the University of California, who said, “One aspect of conscious experience is that it seems you can’t have an experience without an experiencer”. Perhaps then, ‘experiencers’* will be our users of tomorrow.
Afterthought
*If ‘experiencers’ were to be adopted as an alternative to ‘user’ then it would have a far greater impact on the UX discipline than just using a different term in the documents we produce. The most obvious impact would be on the ‘UX’ acronym, which in my opinion has always been an unnecessarily confusing shorthand that was most likely created to mystify and impress clients rather than save time in the writing of the phrase it was designed to shorten. (I still get asked by clients what the ‘X’ stands for!)
Of course ‘Experiencer Experience’ or EX would be impractical and indulgent in every sense. More so, it highlights just how unnecessary the modifier ‘user’ is to the discipline. As Hoffman noted, all experiences need a person to be present in order for it to be an experience. If a tree falls in the woods and no one is around to experience it, does it make a sound?
Of course, the knock-on effect of such a change would be great. Websites, institutions, events, and training courses would all need to rebrand in order to drop the UX prefix. But the benefits to the profession would be worthwhile long term. UX Designers would become Experience Designers, and UX Strategists and CX Strategists would become Experience Strategists. Suddenly the discipline would be unshackled from any digital or real-world constraints and allowed to become more focused, ironically, on the end user or ‘experiencer’ as they go about their lives traversing a multitude of digital and real-life experiences.
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