No more “user”, say “person” instead
This is a story about experience, technology, and applications. It has started forming in my mind for some time and now “feels” the right time to share. It is a story about the word “user”, how it works, and how far it has taken technology and applications.
If you don’t want to go through the whole analysis and thought process in the rest of this post, here’s my proposed thesis:
We, the people working in tech companies, should make the leap past Humanity exploitation, into Humanity extension where we’ll flip our focus away from the user and closer to the person and people. We need to get more attached to Humanism and the social aspects of our human nature.
If you want to engage in a dialogue and debate about the above thesis, please keep reading (it will save us time in the talk to follow, as you’ll have a clearer picture of my thoughts).
My understanding of “the user”
This word encompasses some very good tools that are useful during the development of a new feature or app. Some of those tools are:
- Connection with an imaginary person that will use your application or feature. Having a user to serve means that you will have to tell a story and address that user’s needs.
- A set of characteristics called user characteristics, that can drive your decisions and designs. For example, you will need to adjust your design if your user is not that tech-savvy, or cannot see that good, or does not speak many languages.
- A set of drives and motivations on what that user wants to do in relation to your field of interest. Knowing that this user wants to do work X so that Y is achieved is valuable information that can drive your design and development forward.
Of course, we have further enhanced this toolset with personas, which are user types with different roles, needs, and drives so that we provide better designs for each need and user flows in our products.
OK, now here are some characteristics that we don’t mention when we talk about “the user” and still drive the bigger part of our designs and products:
- User is always action-driven, and we can and OUGHT TO play a big role in what those actions are! Usually, we include in our designs stuff related to impulse-driven action (Fear Of Missing Out, Urgency, Scarcity, Reminders/Notifications).
- User is always on and available, we can ping/notify/poke at any time in order to meet our product/design goals.
- User’s time is an available asset we exploit. Since the user is always available, that means that we need to grab the user’s attention from anything else! It’s an asset we must maximize for our application and minimize for anything else!
- User’s instinctive, impulsive, and instant emotions do matter. We usually focus on “recipes” and flows that create positive emotions and try to replicate them. Since all the references we use, talk about “right here and now” as well as positive outcomes over time (like habits), we tend to forget or ignore accumulative negative effects. It’s like we focus on System-1 mind more than the System-2, in Daniel Kahneman's words.
- In the majority of cases, the user’s behavior is a singularity. Our development's main focus is on individual behavior and gratification. So we don’t check for collectively affected behavior, in a group of people or society, unless it affects individual behavior.
It feels like we do stand at a point that we have conquered all of the above and can safely use them as a “recipe” creating our applications. You can argue that “recipe” is not reflecting the truth, as you still strive to find the correct flows and pinpoint the correct actions sequence to follow but we do all know what to look for (WOW factor, grab attention early, build a habit, identify the key actions to secure a conversion…).
C’mon, why do you say that? Do you have any proof?
Well yes and no. Yes, because I can see multiple signs in the apps I daily use and develop and in the news, no as I don’t have definite proof of the negative impact our designs are flawed.
Following are the signs I find in the applications and their development along with my reasoning behind each point:
- As a user, I want to…. so that I can…, or the user story, it’s the most common first step of each feature and software we all use today. I feel both great using that phrase for my developments, and at the same time, I feel that I’m way past over it. This single phrase is responsible for the majority of the flawed characteristics described above!
- Notifications pouring not raining. Almost if not all of the applications we interact with demand our attention in any way possible like our whole life depends on it! Despite all the great copywriting effort placed on each message, the need for attention is there.
- Engagement emails are another form of notifications that request my attention. Taking into consideration all the progress done on marketing mind-hacks and how I’m forced to look into another “You won’t believe this offer…” or “10 easy steps to fast growth…”.
- Suggestion algorithms work in favor of my needs, sinking me deeper in my bubble and specific interests making me feel unique, at the center of the world, and making me more addicted to the service.
- The “Like” dopamine, that drags us all deeper in applications and finally makes us love them! Research after research describes our addiction to this single button.
- The formerly praised now optional “Auto-watch/Autoplay”, that keeps us more IN the app without the need for any action on our side.
As all those design choices are followed by the majority of tech industries they have already become the norm that more new companies and startups try to adopt. Yet all those choices, have a certain “user” feel to me. There is no bad intention or something wrong with these choices on the surface, yet the final effect on each person and our societies, in general, are becoming more and more tangible.
What follows is a list of real-world behaviors that feel closely related to the above design choices:
- World’s tech addiction. Now more than ever we are addicted to our devices and the installed applications. There are memes representing our addiction, which means that we can resonate and empathize with this behavior.
- Polarisation, where we NEED to break into two or more fractions. We tend to forget dialogue and what brings us together, or we un-learn common knowledge as our own fraction is boosting our beliefs (e.g. anti-vax, Flat-earth, you-get-the-point). Despite being story-driven, exaggerated, and superficial Netflix’s Social Dilemma describes how this polarisation partially works.
- The Pandemic effect in us all! This physical distancing (and NOT social-distancing) has brought forth what we people actually need which is each other! Adding to that anxiety and depression introduced due to uncertainty the effect is only growing stronger. Our relationship with our applications and software is still there and is stronger than before, yet many of our needs are not covered, but barely scratched. Although we got some great benefits because of technology, honest connections, and physical socialization is more important than before. I recall the previous years where “going out with people” meant “sitting together and each one absorbed in their own phone”. It’s like the pandemic has revealed what we actually need on the subconscious than what we want based on our primal instincts and impulses of survival. It feels like the scale won’t roll back 100% to where it was, despite all our development and design efforts all those years.
Repeating here that these are my own opinions expressed here. I’m doing my best to add small reasoning on each point presented to keep this post short. I would love it if you, the reader, challenge, debate, or enhance any of these opinions! This way I, for sure, will be in a better position than the one I’m currently standing in.
Cool, I still follow. So you are saying ditch “user”, and have what instead? We still need to build our apps with empathy!
With all these in mind, I want to propose a shift in mentality towards the person and people analogies. The person is an individual defined outside of the scope of what that person is using at any given time (“the user”). And people are groups of individuals living in a real society interacting with each other towards a common goal of living better together (or just getting along!).
If I were to define that person, I would say that is an emotion-full being, with ups and downs during the day for various reasons. It is a person that strives for a balanced life and wants to grow, not getting too much of X and nothing from Y, but just the right amount of both. We all want to grow and that’s why resolutions and retrospections and psychotherapy is in our minds, we want to be better human beings! Of course, there are cases where we don’t directly communicate that need for growth but if we embrace change we always feel good (we are built this way that’s why)!
We also need to embrace more our unconscious needs to get into a better place, than follow and give-in to our impulses and instincts. This is manifested when we “crunch” during work, or when we spent all our time in an app lazying around and regret it afterward. I would say that we need more slack and cooldown than constant alertness and better time and mind management than stacks of items needing our attention.
Hey man, this is all your opinion so far! Do you have something else to convince me that this is the future?
I do believe we are moving closer to the person than the user. There are some developments, still, from bigger companies and products, that does curve the way for more to come. Those are the well-being applications from Apple, Google, and Slack (that I know of), options like Sleep mode and Do-not-disturb scheduling, pings, and alerts on game-players that are staying for hours in front of their games, Twitter and Facebook attempts to stop misinformation.
Some of these attempts are not triggered by the companies and the development teams but are driven by the people using those applications. Regardless of the motive, the trend is starting to flip, or simply highlight, the scale towards a realization that we are humans living in a connected society.
I predict that in the near future we will see more and more applications and development moving closer to the person and people.
An application that does extremely well in keeping a clear relation with the people that use it is Hey.com. Basecamp, following their own principles, did great work balancing application value and respecting the personal life of people using it.
It feels that our software technology industry has matured gradually from exploring humanity where we identified all those traits and behaviors that define us, to exploiting humanity which is where we are currently standing on, to extending humanity that we have just started scratching the surface of.

That all is sweet and thank you for sharing. Do you have any points on what we can do now in that direction?
Moving closer to the people and embracing humanism is something we can all start doing. Even the smallest baby step in that direction can bring the future closer.
Here are some suggestions that I’m thinking about and applying in my development processes:
- No more “user” but “person”. The quote that stayed with me the most from Social Dilemma was “There are two industries that call their customers ‘users’: illegal drugs and software” from Edward Tufte. That was truly a kick in the butt for me! “No, these are not users! These are people that right now choose to use my application to do something!”
- Do care about emotion and mental state when designing an experience and flow, again NOT user experience — NOT user flow. Although I have this vague in my mind and I don’t have a paradigm to back it up, it feels the right thing to do when dealing with people.
- Engage with people in a more humane way. That “Break the ice” talk at the start of a user interview session is important! Do care personally and do follow up with Chris, Jane, and John that participated in your research. Especially now with the pandemic, I feel that people do appreciate that connection and I do too!
- Finally, and that’s my closing line, start designing with people in mind, NOT just person. We are all connected in the world, and the burden of making it work falls heavy in our arms us designers and developers because people do look at what we deliver and do rely on that for their daily lives!
This is too broad of a topic to be the first one writing about it. There are many people and groups that have been vocal on this topic for quite some time now. The Center for Humane Technology is actively working towards the above direction on a larger scale. Or this great piece by Adam Lefton, and this article on User vs Person. Still, there is always room for another voice and another starting point, our daily work.
I believe this is how all this started, so thank you again Don Norman!
Thank you for reaching the end! This has been a strong thought in my mind that I needed to share with more people! I’d be happy to engage in a discussion and question each and every word written here!