The Term Customer Experience Humanizes Usability
I don’t like the term “user experience.” In my opinion it de-humanizes people, the very people we are trying to help. I think we should banish the term “user experience” and refer instead to “customer experience.” I hope you’ll agree.
I’d like to share a story with you about humanizing people. Please bear with me, it’s a good story, and I hope it will remind you, as it reminds me, that we are dealing with people, and therefore you and I are in the customer experience business, not the user experience business:
The story was about a very old man who had been checked into the hospital by his grown-up daughter. He was in bad shape, his memory was gone, and he was unable to speak with, understand or even recognize anyone around him. He couldn’t take care of himself at all.
His grown-up daughter was worried about how the nurses would treat him. She wanted the nurses to know him, and so treat him as the loving and caring father she had known, not as the lifeless body they saw in the hospital bed. She brought pictures of her dad and her family in to the hospital and placed them on his bedside table. Pictures of her dad when he was younger and she was a child; family pictures of him with his grandkids at Christmas, making snowmen together, teaching her to fish, dressing silly with the kids for Halloween, and his wedding picture with his beautiful young wife.
His daughter wrote a note to the nurses, in which she asked them to not think of her dad as the lifeless body in the bed, but as that younger man who cared so much for his family and his friends, giving of himself with unconditional love. She asked the nurses to please treat him with the same respect and kindness they would show to that younger man.
As you might expect, the nurses did indeed treat her dad with that same kindness and care that she had hoped they would. The nurses were reminded that even though this shell of an old man could not communicate with them, he was still a human. He was a person that cared and loved and gave of himself so that others could experience warmth and joy. He deserved their best care, and they gave it to him.
So what, you may be asking, does that story have to do with Customer Experience?
They’re Not Users, They’re Customers
As a customer experience director and usability practitioner I care about people. I bet you do too. You and I do our jobs because you and I want to make a difference by helping people. We are NOT helping users, we are helping people.
And who are these people? They just might be your friends or neighbors. They may be your aunt, your uncle, or your cousins. They may even be your mom and dad. Just like the nurses in the hospital, let’s humanize the people we are trying to help, so that we remember to treat them with the warmth and consideration they deserve while we are helping improve their customer experience.
In my current job at TouchCommerce, my title is Director of Customer Experience. I like that title. I like it a lot. It exactly explains what I do to make a difference for people. Now don’t get me wrong, I clearly understand and have explained in prior posts that at the end of the day you and I receive paychecks because we help our company be profitable, otherwise there would be no reason to pay us. But you and I could, if we wished, help companies be profitable in any number of ways. I think we choose usability because it helps people while helping a company. Do you feel the same way?
Don’t Settle for “User Experience”
Whether your title or the terms you use have the term “user experience” in it or not, I urge and implore you to not settle or be comfortable with that term. Stop using the term “user” and “user experience.” Instead, refer to “customers,” whether your are involved in customer-facing applications or not. Urge your fellow usability practitioners to also refer to “customers” and “customer experience.” Let’s try to humanize the people we are trying to help.
After all, isn’t that why you and I are in usability?
4 comments ↓
Hi Craig, I do not agree with you
For me the “user” is ,yes, an impersonal term, but it is neutral compared to the product/service.
The “customer” term is, IMHO, more related to product/service, is more active.
So in you job, yes, you have active users coming to you ecommerce website, they are adults, they can make decisions on their own, so also for me they are “customers”.
But my 3 year daughter going to kindergarden, is not a “consumer”, it is more a “user” if we look at all the millions of child of that age. But of course, for me , her family and, I hope, all the staff, she is “Jenny” . And my “Jenny” is not equal to any other Jenny in the world, not even other “people”.
I think that the term “user” is only reserved to human people doing something.
No robot and no animal could be considered a “user”.
So for me “user” is in the same “human” category as “person”.
For the Etymology =>
User : from V.L. *usare “use,” frequentative form of pp. stem of L. uti “to use,” in Old L. oeti “use, employ, exercise, perform,”
Person: from L. persona “human being,”
(source http://www.etymonline.com/)
I see where you’re coming from, and have thought about this myself….at a company I’ve worked at, we’ve considered with the same thing, which resulted in changing things like job titles from user experience architect to experience architect….the user experience dept to experience design, etc., in an attempt to better describe what we do. Because really, the act of experiencing something (at least for our purposes) is inherently human. However, the word customer, to me, certainly connotes an individual that you are selling to. Individuals are obviously multidimensional, don’t think of themselves as “users” or “customers”, and we often need to connect with them on a deeper level than a sales interaction….which is what a brand and a business is more and more about…less about sales, more about making those deeper connections.
So, particularly when I’m talking to clients about the “users” I try to take a more neutral approach, and talk about them as people, or doctors, or sports enthusiasts, or whatever that aspect of their life is where we are trying to create an intersection between the individual and a brand, and I talk about what that experience will be. I find I generally get a good response.
Thanks for the comments guys. And I did mention in my Tweet that this was a rather controversial post.
As long as when we use the term “user” we are remembering that they are in fact breathing, real flesh and blood people, just like our Aunt Nora or friend Willy then that’s fine.
The actual term “customer” might not be the best term to use – but whatever term or method you use to remember that the users are actually humans that’s really the point of the post – as you pointed out Jeremy.
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