How much time do you spend really talking to Users?
Last week there was a surge of conversation about the term user.
Here are some links.
In First we trashed “consumers”, now we’ve effed up “users”, Antonio said,
“…every little company looking to make a similar run has a board full of investors asking the same question every month: “how many users have you got?” …The bummer about it is not the use of the term— but rather how much the constant focus on growing the pool of users quickly distorts any connection that the word user actually has to a real breathing person, even in startups that claim to be “user-centric.”
The conversation swelled to a point of calling for bloggers to post a promise to blackball the term users, with a few bloggers and commenters noting that they were proud of being users and didn’t mind the term. There were also few challenges posted to come up with a better, substitute term.
There was a lot of really passionate feeling at the heart of this conversation from developers who protest the reduction of human beings to a term or a blip of data, yet there was little conversation about who the users are, only about what to call them.
Does changing the terminology really effect much real change? I don’t mind being a user, or a customer, or a consumer in the narrow context of a transaction. I am also, as Antonio put it, a living breathing person. I may be just a blip in your traffic. By the same token, being a user is a blip in the total package of who I, and others like me, are. You can bow down and call me Your Royal Highness and it will not make any substantial difference in why you’re talking to me and what you want from me.
A few years ago, before the rise of blogging, the number of non-tech people interacting online was much smaller, but we were still here. In the communities and groups I’ve participated in, there was typically a very small minority of tech-savvy people who were there for other interests that we all shared in common. They’d help out if someone had a computer problem and that was it.
In some online communities, the administrators consult the contituents on things such as which new fun features they’d like or on minor issues to do with site/community policy. If there are help boards, members can gripe or ask a question, but their isn’t much constructive conversation, to the point that the silence is deafening. Users should start a group weblog about ‘user experience’, except that it might quickly devolve into satire.
The other day I posted that there is no tech speak for non techies and that they simply don’t care ‘how’ things work. That does not mean that they don’t care if it works or if it is of any use to them. I understand very well that there are big viewpoint and language barriers. What I don’t understand is, if the goals are to enable lots of traffic or build and expand online communities, why developers wouldn’t want to really communicate, and even commune, with the intended citizens.
If you’re a tech type or developer reading this, when was the last time you talked about life online with non-techs and how much time do you spend at it? If you’re a non-techie, when was the last time a tech person expressed any real person-to-person interest in your online experiences? I’m not referring to marketing tools such as surveys or other voting mechanisms, but to real conversation.
Anyone?
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added August 5/07:
Tests for Customer Focused Companies posted on August 3/07 by John Hagel.
