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Comment by intrepidhero | Hacker News Reader

I am disturbed by the number of times "user" is replaced with "consumer" and "computer program" with "company" or "brand". Language is important for keeping the goal in sight.

There is a science to designing human computer interactions. But there is a subtle difference between wielding that science in the service of the humans in those interactions (users) and wielding it solely in the name of increasing the company's bottom line. The former will lead to a better product, will improve customer satisfaction and lead to sales. The later leads to a dystopian, exploitative relationship, even when it increases revenue. The difference is the goal: Serving users or serving shareholders. The language of UX design needs to be carefully crafted to keep a the focus on empathy with users.

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This view is over-simplistic. Many—perhaps most—products are designed to serve more than one kind of user.

Obvious example: building an e-commerce platform. The merchant is a kind of user. The customer is a different kind of user on that same platform. Yes, they're humans, but they're not doing the same thing.

Any B2B or B2C type product will have at least two very distinct roles like that. And in those cases, arguing that everyone is just a person as a sort of moral position is destructively vague. It's more difficult to serve someone's needs if you can't start to narrow down what they're trying to accomplish.

While I totally agree with the sentiment that we shouldn't conflate personhood identically with their role in a product, solving useful problems does require that you de-scope and discretize the interactions a bit.

I definitely agree with the sentiment.

Note that there has been debate in the field about the term "user" for decades. Some people object because it is ambiguous, some because it reduces people to their interaction with your software, others due to the connotation with drug use. (For example: https://medium.com/microsoft-design/we-have-customers-not-us...)

I've had people replace instances of one with the other in my documents, so I don't read too much into it these days.

Surely you're thinking of UI design. The term UX design was coined because it's not the same thing. You're right that UX design is not principally intended to benefit the user. That's by design.

I haven't heard that perspective before; the 'U' in "UX" stands for "User".

I think the term "User Experience" picked up in the late 90s (e.g. Don Norman et al's CHI95 paper) when folks felt that the term "interface" had become too narrow and implied a focus on screens and controls and excluded people and what they do with those screens & controls.

The "human-computer interface" originally referred to the boundary where those two systems interfaced and included hardware, software, and wetware. But nowadays if you ask someone to point to the "user interface" they'll probably point at the screen.

If you're interested, there seem to be a cottage industry of blog posts and infographics about the "difference between UI and UX" but in practice it seems that most people use them somewhat interchangeably and I'm not sure how much benefit the semantics debate provides in practice.

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