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.
Drug dealers don't call their customers "users". They call them customers. Only the general public in 1950 whitebread suburbia calls drug customers "users".
Making 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.
We 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:
"“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."
"Buyer" or "seller" is interesting since it makes a functional distinction.
But "Customer" or "user" is just a word choice without an inherent distinction. The way either word is used is very heavily dependent on corporate culture. If a company uses "user" in an cold, impersonal way, it's guaranteed they'll use "customer" in exactly the same way.
While I agree with the general idea, "customer" implies a specific sort of relation (one where consideration is knowingly and directly exchanged for a good or service). Twitter's customers, for example, are advertisers. What do you call all those people who use Twitter as a personal communication platform?
Calling those people customers may perhaps cause subtle shifts in Twitter's behavior such that it would be more aligned with those people's interests, but it wouldn't be accurate!
'Customer' is a misleading term if the person in question does not pay for the product. Given the abundance of free products (both past and present), 'User' has become the norm.
Customer is however a convenient term for a payment processor, where everyone is either a merchant (customer) or payer (customer's customer).
Customer also means something very different from user when you're building line of business software. A "user" works for the business. A "customer" is the user's customer, not your customer.
call it what it is. isn't that what a good domain model is all about.
- if you have a 'real life unit' call them a person
- if you have an organization, call it an organization (although organization's are made up of people and ultimately it's people in the organizations that will be accessing your application, so you're back at person there too)
People who use Twitter are paying for the product, just inadvertently.
I think there's a deeper issue at work here that something like App.net addresses.
There is a complete disconnect between buyer and seller. When someone is using Twitter, they are paying for it by selling their data, but this is just implied.
I think that the industry could solve a whole bunch of issues by:
1.) Charging for their service.
2.) Paying people for their data.
It could be that both balance each other out. It could be some other mechanism. Maybe you earn money, maybe you hold on to your data and you just pay for the full cost of using a service.
Whatever the solution, I think we should start using the term 'customer' and making explicit what is already implied when we're using a 'free' service.
Explicitly paying people for their usage data will overtly change their usage habits because they'll be aware of the fact that everything they do will be sold off to advertisers. A good portion of the value of usage data is that it's not "tainted" by the fact that users are conscious about the tracking in the first place.
I guarantee over 99% of Facebook's billion+ users have no idea that's really how Facebook is making their money. Sure, they might see the ads, but they don't know how those ads really work.
As for calling users "customers" because their data is being sold, well, no, that's not an accurate name for them per the definition of "customer":
cus·tom·er/ˈkəstəmər/
Noun:
A person or organization that buys goods or services from a store or other business.
A person or thing of a specified kind that one has to deal with: "a tough customer".
The label "customer" implies a conscious action of making a purchase. Twitter users are not actively purchasing anything, they're just creating usage data that makes money on the back end.
People should be aware of the fact that what they do will be sold to advertisers. I'm not going to go as far as to support legislature that enforces this awareness, but I wouldn't be surprised if in the next couple of decades that this idea is thrown around by lawmakers.
I wouldn't be surprised if lawmakers set to make it so everyone had the right to make sure their information was not sold to advertisers.
I'm personally under the impression that regulation causes more problems than it solves in the majority of situations so I'm hoping that the industry self-regulates and companies like Facebook and Twitter allow me to pay for their services and opt-out of their business of selling my private information to others.
I'm not really sure why you defined "customer" for me. I never said that Facebook and Twitter users are currently customers, but that they should be.
It is dishonest to have the business taking place "on the back end" of things and to purposefully hide such transactions from people.
I also find it arrogant to think that it is advantageous to shield such financial complexity from people because they don't want to think about it or won't understand it.
So if Facebook and Twitter want to continue to be dishonest and arrogant companies, by all means, let them continue, but I think it will be part of their ultimate demise, either from increased consumer awareness on topics such as information privacy and digital identity, or from legislation.
Wouldn't it be refreshing if Zuck started talkin about all of us as simply 'the product'? I think there's something to this whole removing abstractions stuff.
Naivete and cynicism are not mutually exclusive. "If you're not paying, you're not the customer, you're the product," is a wonderful example of naive cynicism. It imagines that the only participants in a business transaction with full human agency are buyers and sellers; and that if you are neither buyer nor seller, well, the seller and buyer must view you as the not-quite-human product! This meme explains nothing, and reflects a completely broken view of Facebook's business goals. Its cynicism makes it no less naive.
Suppose, for the sake of discussion, that Facebook were a perfectly mercenary, ruthless organization, straight out of HN's collective imagination: it cares nothing about the people using its software, and eats, sleeps, and breathes nothing but monetization. (This view is itself another instance of naive cynicism, but let's grant it to get on with things.) Facebook is still critically reliant on non-paying users continuing to use it; without them, no possible road to monetization exists. Those users are a party to the transaction; they come willingly, and Facebook has no army to compel them to come again tomorrow. Viewing users as inanimate "product" that can be manufactured and sold would be stupid; the "product" is not something that Facebook produced, bought, manufactured, or otherwise has any proprietary claim over.
This relationship is actually pretty close to the relationship that print media have to their readers; your subscription pays for approximately 0% of their revenue; advertisers make newspapers and magazines work. It's also close to broadcast television, where you literally contribute no money to the revenue of the businesses producing programming. It doesn't follow that television studios should view you as inanimate "product"; indeed, television studios work very hard to produce something that real people enjoy, because without those people freely choosing to watch they are out of business.
A much more sensible aphorism would be: "If you're not paying, you're not the customer, you're the audience." This has greater explanatory power, for the behavior of free web service, advertisers, and the audience, which is a willing party to this entire transaction, as the "product" soundbite obscures.
I worked on the enterprise side of the fence (SGI, NetApp, VMware) from 1998 to 2009. We always called them "users" there, too, even though they paid us gobs of money. We do this for the same reason manufacturers of hammers call their customers "customers" when they're buying and selling hammers, but call them "users" when they're using the tool, however they came to possess it. Software is a tool; the people using it are users.
"Customer" emphasizes the transactional side of the relationship. If your check bounces, or you pirated your copy, etc., you're no longer a "customer".
Just look at FB, Twitter, Tumblr. We are customers to them because we're clicking on ads, interacting with the site, and driving traffic. If those sites were a store, and we walked in and looked around, would we be considered customers or users? Customers.
Not quite... we don't give Facebook or Twitter money - their advertisers do. So, their customers are the advertisers. What are they selling? Us - our eyes and attention.
So, we are using the site, but we don't directly give them money to do so. Instead, they get money by putting ads in our faces while we use the site.
Now, the Facebook/Twitter user can be a customer in this scenario, just not of Facebook or Twitter. We (typically) are customers of the advertisers who want us to buy a car or sugar water or a widget.
So, the store analogy isn't quite apt for this... instead you could think of it more like a TV network. They don't call the people who watch their shows customers or users, but rather "viewers". TV network's customers are the businesses that buy time to air their commercials.
The user is not necessarily the customer, or the buyer.
In a company, the buyer or customer may be a manager but the user the members of his team.
In a consumer product, the buyer or customer may be a middle-aged man but the user his 12 years old daughter.
Words have meanings, and randomly inverting them will only cause more confusion. When you sell a product it's important to know who is the custmomer and who is the user. If they're not the same person they will have different goals and needs, and it is important to understand them.
It's a lot more useful to take this advice as, "Reconsider the ways in which you talk about people who use your product or service."
It's not "call them customers" or "call them buyers/sellers"; just think about what makes sense, what evokes the right thoughts, and use that word instead. If 'users' works for you, then keep doing that.
Users.
Sounds like a bunch of junkies or gigolos, doesn't it?
The people who visit web sites aren't "users," click-throughs, hits, numbers on a spreadsheet, or some other form of dehumanizing jargon. They're your husband, your mom, your friend, the guy who sits in the cube next to you. They're real PEOPLE, just like you and me.
That's why we think a successful site is one that makes real people's lives easier; One that makes them say, "This site worked for me." So we've made it our mission to ensure this kind of experience at the sites we build. At 37signals we don't see users, we see people.
I love "getting real" and all the entire philosophy that 37signals brings, but how does this vitriolic comment even make sense? How are you supposed to talk about the people you are designing software for without a generic term? I guess you could say "this happens when the 'person' clicks that" "I think that this menu is more 'person' friendly than that one", but then you're just replacing one generic term with another, and really, what's the point. Claiming some sort of moral high ground based on the usage of generic vocabulary is ridiculous.
Today I completed a feature on our site nitrotype.com where "users" can report other "users" with offensive Display Names (mostly kids play, and they love their offensive names...). The link said "Report User". Based on this, I am changing it to "Report Player".
This is subtle, but it actually feels better to me. Building it as "user" wasn't even a thought, but in truth to a player playing a game, it is an odd abstract term in the context.
Mind you, this was prompted by a question from Howard Schultz, CEO of Starbucks. You know, the company that endlessly confuses people with the words Tall, Grande, and Venti :-)
But while an industry outsider may be unfamiliar with the term "user," I've never worked anywhere where we didn't have the highest appreciation for, and commitment to, the people who use our software. The term does not have any negative connotation to it, and there's not an industry-wide problem here to fix.
well, a problem that I had when I was a barista (at a different coffee chain, back in 2001), was that we didn't have three sizes, we had four. So if somebody asked for a medium, I would get confused and say "well, we have two mediums", and if someone asked for a large I would have to ask "did you want the one that would reasonably be called large or did you want the one that is actually the largest that we have?". Whenever I tried to standardize "small, medium, large, extra-large" or "tiny, small, medium, large", then always half of the people would end up the wrong thing and get upset. It was lose-lose.
So now when I go to a cafe I say "I'd like a twelve ounce coffee", so I don't have to try to translate that through their local notion of whether that's "small" or "medium" or "tall"
I imagine Schultz has probably heard some derogatory comments about "Starbucks users". For companies that provide a service (as opposed to a product), it probably sounds more innocuous, to the point where you wouldn't question it.
Edit: to be clear, I'm referring to someone saying "users" in the sense of "drug users". "McDonald's users" is another one I hear occasionally.
It's a reflection on how software developers can inadvertently distance themselves from the ones who care the most about their software most, their customers.
The terminology and historical use of the word 'user' doesn't give enough weight to the fact that their 'users' are actually customers. Referring to their customers properly shows more respect for their customers while setting the expectations from their developers when building services.
Forums have admins, moderators, posters, subscribers, lurkers.
Torrents have seeders, leechers.
None of these are customers.
Sure, Amazon has customers mostly, and some advertisers.
I would say it's not a reflection of distance of software developers, but more an attempt by developers to create a new all-encompassing term which describes all of these things. People, organizations, machines. More than one per real life unit.
Companies that throw the word "users" around a lot tend to not spend a lot of time actually understanding the people using their product.
Every time I've been responsible for a product, the first thing I've done is make sure we have accurate personas with actual names. Who are the real people using our product? Why are the using it? What makes them happy or sad about it?
I've found that, when presented with good personas, engineering becomes more empathetic for the people using the product, and, as a result, make products that are better for those people (as opposed to better for the engineers, which tends to happen when engineers aren't empathizing with their users).
And I also don't think "users" is a word that needs to be excised from software producer's vocabulary. There are times when you need a word that describes your customers, partners, etc. If you aren't careful, any word you choose there will become too generic.
It's fairly alarming to read company dictats like this one. I hate to think that anyone could have some split second change of mind about the use of a particular word and then try to force it on the rest of the culture, top-down.
Yes, there's some sense in which "user" connotes a detachment from the people who use the programs you create, but I hopefully Square isn't such a centralised culture that the CEO gets to decide on it in isolation from "the team".
Since when are start-ups a Democracy? Are only bottom up decisions allowed or must everything happen organically? I don't think a decision like this needs a company wide referendum. I actually think it would be a waste of time and resources and create an unnecessary distraction.
I find it refreshing Square is open enough to listen to its newest board member and allow them to make an immediate impact. While small this change may not have come from the current culture that is more tech heavy and take the term user for granted.
OK, admittedly a little dramatic to make the point that one thing that can slow down a startup (which should be fast by definition) from their real goal is involving everyone in every decision. It was in response to a board meeting, not quite in isolation as was stated.
What's alarming about establishing communication best practices from the top? Having everybody use the same lingo for talking about product development is essential. This decision will help the engineering culture become inherently more empathetic to towards their end users.
When forming the US Government they had to name the new position. Some wanted it to be regal and powerful, others wanted to keep it humble so the leader wouldn't let the power get to his head. Originally the title President was the lowest and most humble title they could think of for the head of state in the new United States. You only presided over a meeting. Now due to it labeling the position of power the connotation has changed and everyone wants to be President.
Thousands of people, referred to in documents as "customers", are alleged to be directly funding the suspicious private activities of a Jack Dorsey and his co-conspirators at a little-known pseudobank called Square.
Did the term user ever exist in this context before? Thinking about it it seems right when talking inside baseball, but not when writing copy for your business.
Wow that was reactive and heavy handed. The answer isn't to stop using the word user. The word user has it place. Certian conversations need a generic term for the people who "Use" your software where other conversations need a more specific word for the people who use your software such as "Cupcake business owner", "Deli Cashier", etc.
User is not a bad word. However, its not the right word to use to describe some one who uses your software at times (Sometimes you want a more detailed word), and sometimes "user" is the right word (You are talking big idea, vision, less detail). eg. "How many users are hitting our server right now?" "We have 20,000 people submitting tweets, and 1,200,000 people reading tweets."
Recently, in building apps, I've changed how I do accounts. Previously everyone was a "user" and permissions got managed by ACL (yes, yes, I know not the best security model..).
Now I give each type of user their own model. So... "customer", "employee", "admin" for example.
This is interesting because when you write code it is instantly apparent who is the focus of an action. It also helps model how the accounts interact with each other.
We don't, we call our users "users". They are the product we are selling to our customers. We call our customers "customers". Why is he taking such a stupid question as a call to change the way he thinks instead of just answering it?
>No one wants to be thought of as a “user”
Excuse me? I am perfectly content with being thought of as a user of site X when I am a user of site X. I am not a customer of google's, I am a user of their search engine. I am not a customer of HNs, I am a user. If you don't care about your users, then fix that problem, don't try to pretend the word is the problem.
@Jack's article was in the context of Square. At Square, the merchants are the customers, and the merchant's customers are probably classified as the users. In that context, referring to merchants as users might be less precise.
When talking about twitter, I'm absolutely not their customer. I'm their user, and totally agree with your assessment.
One thing absent from @jack's article was a definition of customer:
cus·tom·er/ˈkəstəmər/
Noun: A person or organization that buys goods or services from a store or other business.
> the merchant's customers are probably classified as the users.
I believe his subdivision of "customers" into "sellers" and "buyers" was to solve that issue - "sellers" are the merchants, and "buyers" and the sellers' customers. It all makes sense to me, but you're right - only in a context where you actually have customers
His name is Jack, not @Jack. The question was not posed to him in the context of his specific business, but rather the entire software industry. And his bizarre reaction to it was to spew idiocy at the entire software industry, not just his specific business.
I don't want to be considered customer when I'm in front of my computer. Buyer, maybe when I'm just paying for something, but never customer. It has so many bad connotations. Calling me user emphasizes my actions as an independent agent, but calling me customer emphasizes the fact that I'm perceived as a bag of cash to drain.
I agree, although as with many other things, our distinctions are not always obvious to people whose expertise lies elsewhere. I think it's goofy that my 401k plan is a "product" to financial guys, who have a dozen other names for money as well. I try to be accurate and use the right term, and not to get offended when someone uses something it differently.
User is no more confusing due to drug connotations than visitor is due to alien connotations or client is to prostitution. We can find nefarious or suggestive inferences in nearly every word if we want.
user - someone who is using the system
visitor - someone who came to a site (web, B&M, etc).
viewer - someone who saw something
account - a long term relationship with a person or group
customer - someone who is intending to spend money
buyer - someone who is actually spending money
client - someone who is the target of a service
So you can fall into a number of categories here at once, and it's more important that you're accurate when expressing your idea than to simplify it. Marketing is all about increasing the numbers of a certain one of these, often by converting them from another.
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[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 175 ms ] threadIt pithily drove the point home for me: I had never been designing for users, but people.
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.
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."
But "Customer" or "user" is just a word choice without an inherent distinction. The way either word is used is very heavily dependent on corporate culture. If a company uses "user" in an cold, impersonal way, it's guaranteed they'll use "customer" in exactly the same way.
Calling those people customers may perhaps cause subtle shifts in Twitter's behavior such that it would be more aligned with those people's interests, but it wouldn't be accurate!
Customer is however a convenient term for a payment processor, where everyone is either a merchant (customer) or payer (customer's customer).
- if you have a 'real life unit' call them a person
- if you have an organization, call it an organization (although organization's are made up of people and ultimately it's people in the organizations that will be accessing your application, so you're back at person there too)
- if you have a machine, call it a machine
- Agent - Entity - User - Principal
I think there's a deeper issue at work here that something like App.net addresses.
There is a complete disconnect between buyer and seller. When someone is using Twitter, they are paying for it by selling their data, but this is just implied.
I think that the industry could solve a whole bunch of issues by:
1.) Charging for their service.
2.) Paying people for their data.
It could be that both balance each other out. It could be some other mechanism. Maybe you earn money, maybe you hold on to your data and you just pay for the full cost of using a service.
Whatever the solution, I think we should start using the term 'customer' and making explicit what is already implied when we're using a 'free' service.
I guarantee over 99% of Facebook's billion+ users have no idea that's really how Facebook is making their money. Sure, they might see the ads, but they don't know how those ads really work.
As for calling users "customers" because their data is being sold, well, no, that's not an accurate name for them per the definition of "customer":
cus·tom·er/ˈkəstəmər/
Noun:
A person or organization that buys goods or services from a store or other business.
A person or thing of a specified kind that one has to deal with: "a tough customer".
The label "customer" implies a conscious action of making a purchase. Twitter users are not actively purchasing anything, they're just creating usage data that makes money on the back end.
I wouldn't be surprised if lawmakers set to make it so everyone had the right to make sure their information was not sold to advertisers.
I'm personally under the impression that regulation causes more problems than it solves in the majority of situations so I'm hoping that the industry self-regulates and companies like Facebook and Twitter allow me to pay for their services and opt-out of their business of selling my private information to others.
I'm not really sure why you defined "customer" for me. I never said that Facebook and Twitter users are currently customers, but that they should be.
It is dishonest to have the business taking place "on the back end" of things and to purposefully hide such transactions from people.
I also find it arrogant to think that it is advantageous to shield such financial complexity from people because they don't want to think about it or won't understand it.
So if Facebook and Twitter want to continue to be dishonest and arrogant companies, by all means, let them continue, but I think it will be part of their ultimate demise, either from increased consumer awareness on topics such as information privacy and digital identity, or from legislation.
Suppose, for the sake of discussion, that Facebook were a perfectly mercenary, ruthless organization, straight out of HN's collective imagination: it cares nothing about the people using its software, and eats, sleeps, and breathes nothing but monetization. (This view is itself another instance of naive cynicism, but let's grant it to get on with things.) Facebook is still critically reliant on non-paying users continuing to use it; without them, no possible road to monetization exists. Those users are a party to the transaction; they come willingly, and Facebook has no army to compel them to come again tomorrow. Viewing users as inanimate "product" that can be manufactured and sold would be stupid; the "product" is not something that Facebook produced, bought, manufactured, or otherwise has any proprietary claim over.
This relationship is actually pretty close to the relationship that print media have to their readers; your subscription pays for approximately 0% of their revenue; advertisers make newspapers and magazines work. It's also close to broadcast television, where you literally contribute no money to the revenue of the businesses producing programming. It doesn't follow that television studios should view you as inanimate "product"; indeed, television studios work very hard to produce something that real people enjoy, because without those people freely choosing to watch they are out of business.
A much more sensible aphorism would be: "If you're not paying, you're not the customer, you're the audience." This has greater explanatory power, for the behavior of free web service, advertisers, and the audience, which is a willing party to this entire transaction, as the "product" soundbite obscures.
"Customer" emphasizes the transactional side of the relationship. If your check bounces, or you pirated your copy, etc., you're no longer a "customer".
So, we are using the site, but we don't directly give them money to do so. Instead, they get money by putting ads in our faces while we use the site.
Now, the Facebook/Twitter user can be a customer in this scenario, just not of Facebook or Twitter. We (typically) are customers of the advertisers who want us to buy a car or sugar water or a widget.
So, the store analogy isn't quite apt for this... instead you could think of it more like a TV network. They don't call the people who watch their shows customers or users, but rather "viewers". TV network's customers are the businesses that buy time to air their commercials.
In a company, the buyer or customer may be a manager but the user the members of his team.
In a consumer product, the buyer or customer may be a middle-aged man but the user his 12 years old daughter.
Words have meanings, and randomly inverting them will only cause more confusion. When you sell a product it's important to know who is the custmomer and who is the user. If they're not the same person they will have different goals and needs, and it is important to understand them.
Youtube has video uploaders, commenters, raters.
Games have players, coaches, referees, bots.
Forums have admins, moderators, posters, subscribers, lurkers.
Torrents have seeders, leechers.
Sure, Amazon has customers mostly, and some advertisers.
New terms are ubiquitous from convention, not from reasoning.
In any case, I don't think using "customer" as a replacement is necessarily enlightened or inspired. There's got to be a more creative term.
But then, that might just give rise to another esoteric buzzword, and I'd rather not have that either.
I'm just going to stick with "user".
It's not "call them customers" or "call them buyers/sellers"; just think about what makes sense, what evokes the right thoughts, and use that word instead. If 'users' works for you, then keep doing that.
The people who visit web sites aren't "users," click-throughs, hits, numbers on a spreadsheet, or some other form of dehumanizing jargon. They're your husband, your mom, your friend, the guy who sits in the cube next to you. They're real PEOPLE, just like you and me.
That's why we think a successful site is one that makes real people's lives easier; One that makes them say, "This site worked for me." So we've made it our mission to ensure this kind of experience at the sites we build. At 37signals we don't see users, we see people.
http://37signals.com/01.html
. . . just as relevant in this bullshit bubble as it was in the last.
This is subtle, but it actually feels better to me. Building it as "user" wasn't even a thought, but in truth to a player playing a game, it is an odd abstract term in the context.
But while an industry outsider may be unfamiliar with the term "user," I've never worked anywhere where we didn't have the highest appreciation for, and commitment to, the people who use our software. The term does not have any negative connotation to it, and there's not an industry-wide problem here to fix.
It wouldn't surprise me if this were a designed response from Starbucks, encouraging their customers to develop and internalize the Starbucks dialect.
So now when I go to a cafe I say "I'd like a twelve ounce coffee", so I don't have to try to translate that through their local notion of whether that's "small" or "medium" or "tall"
Edit: to be clear, I'm referring to someone saying "users" in the sense of "drug users". "McDonald's users" is another one I hear occasionally.
Agents might be more accurate.
Why are we talking about this?
#biggerproblems
The terminology and historical use of the word 'user' doesn't give enough weight to the fact that their 'users' are actually customers. Referring to their customers properly shows more respect for their customers while setting the expectations from their developers when building services.
Youtube has video uploaders, commenters, raters.
Games have players, coaches, referees, bots.
Forums have admins, moderators, posters, subscribers, lurkers.
Torrents have seeders, leechers.
None of these are customers.
Sure, Amazon has customers mostly, and some advertisers.
I would say it's not a reflection of distance of software developers, but more an attempt by developers to create a new all-encompassing term which describes all of these things. People, organizations, machines. More than one per real life unit.
Every time I've been responsible for a product, the first thing I've done is make sure we have accurate personas with actual names. Who are the real people using our product? Why are the using it? What makes them happy or sad about it?
I've found that, when presented with good personas, engineering becomes more empathetic for the people using the product, and, as a result, make products that are better for those people (as opposed to better for the engineers, which tends to happen when engineers aren't empathizing with their users).
And I also don't think "users" is a word that needs to be excised from software producer's vocabulary. There are times when you need a word that describes your customers, partners, etc. If you aren't careful, any word you choose there will become too generic.
Yes, there's some sense in which "user" connotes a detachment from the people who use the programs you create, but I hopefully Square isn't such a centralised culture that the CEO gets to decide on it in isolation from "the team".
I find it refreshing Square is open enough to listen to its newest board member and allow them to make an immediate impact. While small this change may not have come from the current culture that is more tech heavy and take the term user for granted.
http://www.nizkor.org/features/fallacies/straw-man.html
Your attitude toward your users/customers/whatever matters. The word you call them, not so much.
You're only a customer (uh)
Walkin' in the presence of hustlers
You spend money all night long
"All night long."
When forming the US Government they had to name the new position. Some wanted it to be regal and powerful, others wanted to keep it humble so the leader wouldn't let the power get to his head. Originally the title President was the lowest and most humble title they could think of for the head of state in the new United States. You only presided over a meeting. Now due to it labeling the position of power the connotation has changed and everyone wants to be President.
Customer makes me think it's about paying for the product.
Users are my friends. Customers are my clients.
User is not a bad word. However, its not the right word to use to describe some one who uses your software at times (Sometimes you want a more detailed word), and sometimes "user" is the right word (You are talking big idea, vision, less detail). eg. "How many users are hitting our server right now?" "We have 20,000 people submitting tweets, and 1,200,000 people reading tweets."
$140... 140 characters. Subtle jab at Twitter?
So not "subtle jab", rather "pseudo-subtle nod".
Never gonna stop.
Now I give each type of user their own model. So... "customer", "employee", "admin" for example.
This is interesting because when you write code it is instantly apparent who is the focus of an action. It also helps model how the accounts interact with each other.
We don't, we call our users "users". They are the product we are selling to our customers. We call our customers "customers". Why is he taking such a stupid question as a call to change the way he thinks instead of just answering it?
>No one wants to be thought of as a “user”
Excuse me? I am perfectly content with being thought of as a user of site X when I am a user of site X. I am not a customer of google's, I am a user of their search engine. I am not a customer of HNs, I am a user. If you don't care about your users, then fix that problem, don't try to pretend the word is the problem.
When talking about twitter, I'm absolutely not their customer. I'm their user, and totally agree with your assessment.
One thing absent from @jack's article was a definition of customer:
cus·tom·er/ˈkəstəmər/ Noun: A person or organization that buys goods or services from a store or other business.
I believe his subdivision of "customers" into "sellers" and "buyers" was to solve that issue - "sellers" are the merchants, and "buyers" and the sellers' customers. It all makes sense to me, but you're right - only in a context where you actually have customers
I don't want to be considered customer when I'm in front of my computer. Buyer, maybe when I'm just paying for something, but never customer. It has so many bad connotations. Calling me user emphasizes my actions as an independent agent, but calling me customer emphasizes the fact that I'm perceived as a bag of cash to drain.
User is no more confusing due to drug connotations than visitor is due to alien connotations or client is to prostitution. We can find nefarious or suggestive inferences in nearly every word if we want.
So you can fall into a number of categories here at once, and it's more important that you're accurate when expressing your idea than to simplify it. Marketing is all about increasing the numbers of a certain one of these, often by converting them from another.