Users = Zombies
So Give Them A Better Name
I wince every time I read or hear the word ‘user’. A momentary flash of discomfort that completely blocks out the words that follow. Like an ethnic slur. The word strips people of their humanity, effectively reducing them to a faceless horde that exists solely to click or tap. ‘Users’ are zombies.
I’m amazed I still come across the word so frequently. I once heard my grandmother describe someone of Chinese descent as ‘oriental’. She wasn’t being racist. She was just unaware that some words, which used to be socially acceptable, are now considered offensive. ‘User’ is no different. It’s a remnant from the early days of computing that has taken hold as the default way to refer to someone who interacts with a product. And it’s a travesty.
I work at Telecast, where we’re building a platform for independent serial video content, like web shows and video blogs, to enable creators to cultivate and maintain a passionate audience. So I’m going to pick on a couple other products in the video entertainment domain to illustrate the dangers of referring to product participants as ‘users’.
Hulu’s mission statement reads:
Hulu’s mission is to help people find and enjoy the world’s premium video content when, where and how they want it. As we pursue this mission, we aspire to create a service that users, advertisers and content owners unabashedly love.
I watch videos on Hulu, but I don’t provide ads or content, so by process of elimination, Hulu must see me as a ‘user.’ But whereas ‘advertisers’ and ‘content owners’ refer to specific groups of people whose behaviors and motivations are reasonably clear, ‘users’ comes off as a blanket term for ‘everyone else’. By phrasing their mission this way, Hulu appears to be prioritizing the needs of the advertisers and content owners over the people that consume their content. And are we to understand that advertisers and content owners are somehow not ‘using’ the product?
YouTube blatantly refers to its members as ‘users’ right in their URL scheme. Channels are reached via youtube.com/user/<name>. On its own, this is format is only offensive to overly sensitive designers like me. But the URL scheme elevates some entities beyond ‘user’ status with the ‘artist’ extension (e.g. youtube.com/artist/biggie-smalls). Granted, ‘artist’ channels are auto-generated, and thus function very differently from ‘user’ channels. But, like Hulu, to call out a certain group of people with a defined label, and then refer to everyone else as a generic ‘user’ is demoralizing.
Obviously, we often need a way to refer to the people who enjoy our products, and I’m hardly the first person to propose eliminating ‘user’ from our vocabularies. But the alternatives I’ve heard others suggest are only marginally better. Don Norman likes ‘people’. And Jack Dorsey prefers ‘customer’. Sure, the drug connotation is gone, but do these still-generic terms get us closer to recognizing the behaviors and motivations behind the use of our products? Isn’t everyone who uploads original content on YouTube an ‘artist’?
We can do better. Every product company, be it a new startup or a large enterprise, should establish a lexicon to refer to its clientele in an effort to champion a human-centric culture. In many cases, there are distinct groups that merit their own names. At Telecast, like Hulu and YouTube, we have a set of people who create the content, and a set of people who consume it. And we know that participation in one group doesn’t preclude participation in another. We call the creators ‘showrunners’ (a term borrowed from the television industry to refer to the people who often handle writing, directing, and production.) And we call the audience ‘fans’.
By forcing ourselves not to fall back on a catch-all term, and choosing names that call out the motivations behind the use of our product, we’re constantly reminded of what brings people to us. And how we can better serve them. We don’t have ‘users’, and neither should you.
