Kizmo

Lucky for us we could attend the conference and still get some work done. I was able to listen to some great speakers talking about very interesting work. The conference started on Tuesday with Don Norman causally speaking about User Experience Design.

One item that stood out for me on this early Tuesday morning, was one tidbit about the use of the word “User”. “User” is very impersonal, and therefore removes the designer, coder, business manager and client, away from the actual people who they are trying to reach. In looking for words to replace “user”, the thesaurus is not much help: Customer, Client, Consumer, and Operator. As Mr. Norman pointed out, Users are People. Referring to “the user” is a quick way of referencing a person who interacts with a product. It is hard to swap “people” for “user” and still convey a sense of a person interacting with and reacting to a product. In our documentation, we start with “The User” to set the stage, but then continue with a pronoun, alternating between she and he throughout the document. This helps us, as experience designers, to think about the people who will be using the product and it reinforces this fact to our clients when they are reading the material.

So we are now just Experience Designers.