“User” Experience: A Modest Proposition

As acclaimed information designer Edward Tufte once pointed out, software designers and drug pushers are the only two practitioners that refer to their customers as “users”.

Why not pick the name of a persona & plug that name into the designer’s title?

While I’m certainly grateful for the recognition and appreciation of the importance of the UX design field over recent years, I’m not thrilled with the semantics of the title. Words matter, and we can do better.

Although this post won’t make a shred of difference in what the UX community is called, I’d like to make a few suggestions:

• Human Experience Designer—Sure, it may sound rather lofty, but, until dogs really do learn to use the internet, we are designing for humans. It also borrows from HCI, a respected discipline in which many UX practitioners are trained
• Customer Experience Designer—The vast majority of people in the UX field are crafting experiences targeted at the customers of an organization. While descriptive and accurate, the transactional nature of a customer may actually serve to dehumanize end-users, ultimately reducing designers’ empathy
• “Linda” Experience Designer—As a UX designer, you have undoubtedly crafted audience personas to better inform your design decisions. In order to ensure designers maintain empathy and focus on designing for the end user (rather than themselves), why not pick the name of a persona—”Linda” for instance—and plug that name into the designer’s title. I realize it doesn’t scale, especially if you work on multiple accounts, but you get my point

How about you? Are you ready to trade the “U” out of your title? Do you have any other ideas for alternatives?

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