It’s almost shocking to admit that I’ve been creating web applications for people for close to twenty years now. That’s not to suggest that I don’t love it – I always have. There are a lot of reasons to love building web apps, but the one I love the most is the impact that the things I build have on the people who end up using them.
During those nearly twenty years I’ve been careful to write and speak sentences similar to the one that ends the previous paragraph. Does it standout as carefully written to you? If you’re a software developer you might think it’s a wordy way of just saying a word that I find, frankly, ugly: users.
I think it’s ugly because it totally disconnects the living, breathing, emotional, and real human being sitting in front of your application and turns them into some sort of component in a system. It changes how you design things, how you prioritize features, and how you predict the adoption (or rejection) of both. You need to remember the eccentricities of human behavior, emotions, and rationale (or lack thereof) if you want to make applications for people. It’s ugly because it’s a low resolution word that is used when really high resolution words are required in order to properly think about the problems you’re trying to solve.
Consider the studies done that suggest that people who speak a language that doesn’t have two words for two slightly different colors consider the colors to be identical. For example, in the English language, we have names for the somewhat similar colors magenta, fucsia, and pink – if we didn’t have the word fucsia, there’s a high likelihood that we’d call a swatch of fucsia pink or magenta.
It’s easier to say ‘user’ than it is to say ’someone who is studying for their GMAT test’, and I’m not always as diligent in avoiding the word as I’d like to be, but I catch myself often because I know there’s a difference between ‘an affluent liberal arts undergrad student’ and ‘returning to school after 20 years of putting off their MBA student’. Both are ‘users’, and both students, but their motivations and expectations are likely different enough to warrant consideration. If I do say ‘user’, it’s not without having first put in the effort to think a user as a person.
The rewards of being able to think clearly about the problems and desires of the people you’re creating solutions for far outweigh the extra bit of cognitive effort required to avoid the easy path.
