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I've stopped calling my customers "users" since I heard Jeff Veen say, back at an Adaptive Path seminar in 2004, "there are only two businesses that call its cu
by kareemm 14y ago
I've stopped calling my customers "users" since I heard Jeff Veen say, back at an Adaptive Path seminar in 2004, "there are only two businesses that call its customers 'users'."
It pithily drove the point home for me: I had never been designing for users, but people.
- thisisblurry 14y agoWhat were those two businesses?
- hawleyal 14y agoDrug dealers don't call their customers "users". They call them customers. Only the general public in 1950 whitebread suburbia calls drug customers "users".
- snogglethorpe 14y agoMaking a decision based on your gut reaction to a pithy quip is a very bad idea. Pithiness is a rhetorical technique, and hides misinformation as often as it emphasizes insight. Pithy quips emphasize cleverness of expression. The cleverness dazzles, and seduces the listener into agreement—but if you actually stand back and look at what they mean, they often fall down badly. Many very clever quips are shallow, meaningless, or just wrong, but they sound profound. People very often don't bother with the "thinking about it" step though, and the result is that pithiness helps spread a lot of silly notions.
- smcnally 14y agoWe generally mean, or want, "participants" or "members." I'm certain the coinage above isn't Veen's and predates 2004. Just recently, I looked for a source and could not find the canonical. I'd been working on this: http://www.forbes.com/sites/smcnally/2012/10/15/guided-by-voices/ http://www.forbes.com/sites/smcnally/2012/10/15/guided-by-vo... "“The only people who refer to their clients as ‘users’ are drug dealers and technologists.” ... We still refer to “visitors,” “audience,” “consumers” when what we say we want are participants. ... We distinguish “creators” from ”consumers.” It’s a disconnect. While it’s just labeling, it has a great deal of bearing on our attitude toward the community."