Start with a Tron quote, then mention “User”. Crazy hippie technologist. I’ll meet you in 1982 by the bus at the Dead show. Bring your printouts.

"User" sounds like an antique term, stereotypical. The idea now made somewhat laughable. User no longer a target, now it’s value, demographics, market share, a bag of other indistinct terms with flair. Often, it’s just the generic slurry barrel known as “traffic”.

Is it? Consider the NYTimes demise of the TimesPeople feature, which was their social network strategy they launched with tons of fanfare (I can make a reasonable guess it was very very expensive). Then, OK, fine, they didn’t think it was working out. Clearly the last to know about this, if they were to know at all, were the Users. Bad marketing? Bad PR? Sure. Sucks for the people on it? Yes.

How much of this could be avoided if we allowed the pesky trouble making term “User” back into conversation?

Not uncommon, at least in the larger organizations I’ve worked in, is avoiding it wholesale. User is the last one to know, routinely, never asked, impersonally responded to, basically nonexistent. Habitually it’s “will Bob downstairs at marketing like this?” “what will Joe in the corner office think?”, nary a thought for the basic User. Not to say these parties should be entirely ignored, not, at least, to the degree the User is. And certainly my argument is that the idea should not only exist but be front and center.

Books written conceptualize a Reader, applications written should conceptualize a User. I’m not talking about refactoring every time you get a complaining email from a single user, but more the larger idea.

Without the faintest doubt in my mind, Government services are guilty. Exemplary about not having a User. But also banks. Very much credit card companies. If you’ve been to the Amex site recently you’ll know that they seem to take particular sadistic pleasure implementing design and features that are exactly the opposite of what you’d ever want. In fact, so insidiously precise is their site at flummoxing any hope of clear use and navigation that I think they deserve an award (currently unnamed) and a large ceremony where other organizational middle managers can show off their atrocities (to one another of course) over an open bar.

Startups have the advantage, they’re small, flexible, hungry, they want User, they need User. Obviously there are other politics involved, but the idea is at least important, User is a Thing, features revolve around it. You may miss the target or misunderstand the User, but it’s there at least.