The Industry

Social Ontology July 27, 2007

Conrad aphorised to me, years ago, that only software developers and drug pushers call their respective audiences “users”. Today I see a related meme going around; some pundits are imploring each other to stop calling everyone “users”.

That’s cool, and overdue, but this isn’t actually a semantic problem. Sure, you can do a find-and-replace and substitute the word “person”, but does that change anything?

The problem with “user” is ontological. What producers could be doing better is figuring out how to accurately, meaningfully incorporate people into their application’s schema. What role do they play? How do they define themselves, in relation to your system? It’s going to be different—should be different—in different contexts.

Examples:

• A blog has “readers”
• A community has “members”
• A store has “customers”
• A service has “subscribers”

This happens when you actually think about what a person’s relationship is to your product specifically. What happens is, it forces you, as the producer, to continually question your application’s focus. What also happens is, you’re continually reminded of why these people are important. Which call do you answer first? A call from a customer, or a call from a user? Customers first, I would think. (They would think so too.)

You may be capable of doing it in your head—mentally mapping “user” to “customer”. If that’s the case, then none of this matters; you can call them giraffes if you want. However, it’s worthwhile to codify this in your software, Web site, whatever, because it will make the role people play all the more transparent to your developers, audience, and to the media.