Jack Dorsey: Let's Reconsider Our "Users"

'Customer' is a misleading term if the person in question does not pay for the product. Given the abundance of free products (both past and present), 'User' has become the norm.

Customer is however a convenient term for a payment processor, where everyone is either a merchant (customer) or payer (customer's customer).

It's fairly alarming to read company dictats like this one. I hate to think that anyone could have some split second change of mind about the use of a particular word and then try to force it on the rest of the culture, top-down.

Yes, there's some sense in which "user" connotes a detachment from the people who use the programs you create, but I hopefully Square isn't such a centralised culture that the CEO gets to decide on it in isolation from "the team".

Mind you, this was prompted by a question from Howard Schultz, CEO of Starbucks. You know, the company that endlessly confuses people with the words Tall, Grande, and Venti :-)

But while an industry outsider may be unfamiliar with the term "user," I've never worked anywhere where we didn't have the highest appreciation for, and commitment to, the people who use our software. The term does not have any negative connotation to it, and there's not an industry-wide problem here to fix.

'User' only seems depersonalizing because of familiarity. Use 'customer' as habitually, and it too will eventually seem generic. And then, expect posts about how 'customer' compresses our understanding of these people to an economically reductionist relationship. (The 'euphemistic treadmill' is a related concept.)

Ultimately, an attitude can make up for the word choice. For example, if you say 'user' with the same reverence as do the software agents in the original 'Tron' movie, you'll be paying the users way more respect than 'customer' grants.

Wow that was reactive and heavy handed. The answer isn't to stop using the word user. The word user has it place. Certian conversations need a generic term for the people who "Use" your software where other conversations need a more specific word for the people who use your software such as "Cupcake business owner", "Deli Cashier", etc.

User is not a bad word. However, its not the right word to use to describe some one who uses your software at times (Sometimes you want a more detailed word), and sometimes "user" is the right word (You are talking big idea, vision, less detail). eg. "How many users are hitting our server right now?" "We have 20,000 people submitting tweets, and 1,200,000 people reading tweets."

Heartwarming. I predict in short order the phrase "customer" will take on all of the negative connotations normally associated with the phrase "user".

Users. Sounds like a bunch of junkies or gigolos, doesn't it?

The people who visit web sites aren't "users," click-throughs, hits, numbers on a spreadsheet, or some other form of dehumanizing jargon. They're your husband, your mom, your friend, the guy who sits in the cube next to you. They're real PEOPLE, just like you and me.

That's why we think a successful site is one that makes real people's lives easier; One that makes them say, "This site worked for me." So we've made it our mission to ensure this kind of experience at the sites we build. At 37signals we don't see users, we see people.

http://37signals.com/01.html

. . . just as relevant in this bullshit bubble as it was in the last.

"Buyer" or "seller" is interesting since it makes a functional distinction.

But "Customer" or "user" is just a word choice without an inherent distinction. The way either word is used is very heavily dependent on corporate culture. If a company uses "user" in an cold, impersonal way, it's guaranteed they'll use "customer" in exactly the same way.

"Users" is a powerful word. It reflects the things that matter to those who use the tools we create: usefulness, usability, and most of all -- the simple fact that what we create is used by people to do something.

To eliminate the word "user", I have to say "the people formerly known as users but who will now be known as the people who use our app." I cannot call them "people", because our users are a specific subset of people... they are people in context that matters, deeply. The context of using something we made.

I have always agreed with those who say that if you have a problem with employees dissing users, the problem does not live in the word "users". If they don't think of users as people, fix that first. I am more concerned that the word customer puts the focus on people-who-pay vs. people-who-use.

I think the problem is precisely the opposite: not enough people think of their customers as users. For example, we tell our authors to think of their readers as users, not just readers. They're not buying our books to be exposed to our prose... They're trying to use what's in there to do something they care about.

It's a lot more useful to take this advice as, "Reconsider the ways in which you talk about people who use your product or service."

It's not "call them customers" or "call them buyers/sellers"; just think about what makes sense, what evokes the right thoughts, and use that word instead. If 'users' works for you, then keep doing that.

I don't think there's anything necessarily wrong with the term "user." It's a top-level generic term that could be broken down to better describe those who use your service. In Square's case, that's "buyers" and "sellers" who are both "customers" of the Square platform.

It seems obvious, but I understand what Dorsey's getting at. I've struggled with finding appropriately specific identifiers, and when in doubt just lumped everyone together as "users."

Context matters. Square happens to be one of those paid services whose categories of "users" are pretty easy to identify and name. Like you guys mentioned in your comments, redefining specific terms for "users" of free services and search engines isn't quite as simple. I would suggest "freeloaders" or "browsers" but that would take us in the wrong direction :)

I'm content being labeled a "user" for now.

Customer abstracts people as well. Why not just call people... people?

Kind of interesting that the CEO of Twitter and Square has the time to think and write blog posts about referring to people as "users" or "customers" internally. Must be a tough and time-consuming job.

User makes me think it's about using the product.

Customer makes me think it's about paying for the product.

Users are my friends. Customers are my clients.

The user is not necessarily the customer, or the buyer.

In a company, the buyer or customer may be a manager but the user the members of his team.

In a consumer product, the buyer or customer may be a middle-aged man but the user his 12 years old daughter.

Words have meanings, and randomly inverting them will only cause more confusion. When you sell a product it's important to know who is the custmomer and who is the user. If they're not the same person they will have different goals and needs, and it is important to understand them.

While I agree with the general idea, "customer" implies a specific sort of relation (one where consideration is knowingly and directly exchanged for a good or service). Twitter's customers, for example, are advertisers. What do you call all those people who use Twitter as a personal communication platform?

Calling those people customers may perhaps cause subtle shifts in Twitter's behavior such that it would be more aligned with those people's interests, but it wouldn't be accurate!

It's funny to see this on the same day as Olia Lialina's article "Turing Complete User"

http://contemporary-home-computing.org/turing-complete-user/

which argues that speaking of "users" is a mark of respect for their intelligence and autonomy, and that the computer industry is going astray by failing to speak of them.

Companies that throw the word "users" around a lot tend to not spend a lot of time actually understanding the people using their product.

Every time I've been responsible for a product, the first thing I've done is make sure we have accurate personas with actual names. Who are the real people using our product? Why are the using it? What makes them happy or sad about it?

I've found that, when presented with good personas, engineering becomes more empathetic for the people using the product, and, as a result, make products that are better for those people (as opposed to better for the engineers, which tends to happen when engineers aren't empathizing with their users).

And I also don't think "users" is a word that needs to be excised from software producer's vocabulary. There are times when you need a word that describes your customers, partners, etc. If you aren't careful, any word you choose there will become too generic.

Frequenters of free sites are paying with their time and attention. If you don't return value for time and attention to these customers, they will move on.

If you don't consider yourself a servant of your customers, and work to please them, your contempt is going to come out instead. I got tired of being used by Facebook. I don't feel that anyone has my back at Facebook. I moved on.

By contrast there are a few sites that bend over backwards to delight me, their customer, whether or not they charge me money or make money from me. Customer service sets great sites apart from sites not worth my time.

Often, especially in BTB offerings, it makes a lot of sense to differentiate "customer" from "user." Take for example: the decision-maker who signs the deal and writes the check never actually uses the product, instead has staff which does so. Differentiating the customer from the user is very important in this context: you have to make and keep both happy. The customer will consider net impact to bottom line, high-level capabilities generally present in the market place, and the general temperature of the users before buying. They will expect that you have a certain list of capabilities which everyone else is selling them, even if their users will hardly, if ever, use that feature. The day-to-day users of the product, however, will have less abstract problems - they have real tasks to achieve every day, and will care much more about the specific capabilities and how they're implemented.

Sure, we could call them "decision-making" customer and "product-using" customer, but semantics driving psychology work the other way around as well : sales is customer-driven, and development and support are user-driven. Same end result is achieved, while using natural language for the target audience.

Today I completed a feature on our site nitrotype.com where "users" can report other "users" with offensive Display Names (mostly kids play, and they love their offensive names...). The link said "Report User". Based on this, I am changing it to "Report Player".

This is subtle, but it actually feels better to me. Building it as "user" wasn't even a thought, but in truth to a player playing a game, it is an odd abstract term in the context.

I thought that it was odd that he dislikes "user" because it is impersonal (he wouldn't call his mom one), but then he chose replacements that are nearly as impersonal (I'm sure he wouldn't call his mom a buyer or a seller either). "Customer" is going to get very confusing if they start using it for people who aren't actually paying for anything. So while I see his point, I don't think he's improved the situation.

Recently, in building apps, I've changed how I do accounts. Previously everyone was a "user" and permissions got managed by ACL (yes, yes, I know not the best security model..).

Now I give each type of user their own model. So... "customer", "employee", "admin" for example.

This is interesting because when you write code it is instantly apparent who is the focus of an action. It also helps model how the accounts interact with each other.

I like the sentiment, but I'm not a fan of linguistic prescriptivism. Words mean what they mean, not what the dictionary says they mean.

Personally I'm thrilled when people use my product. I've never thought of the term user having a negative connotation when referring to software users. Is that really a vestige of hacker culture?

Dorsey's post gives me an uneasy feeling. Because everyone receiving the memo knows on some level that it's BS. It's couched in the terms of showing respect for users as people. But the subtext is simply that we need to act as if we respect the people using our product because they provide money.

The whole exalting of the customer in modern marketing speak is emblematic of a lack of respect for people as fellow human beings. It's kind of a perversion of the cliche "the customer is always right. Obviously the customer is not always right, that's why the frickin' expression exists! It's an acknowledgment of the asymmetry that exists in buyer/seller transactions. You're not supposed to believe it, just act like you do.

I'm a user, have been since 1993, when they handed me that first hit of email username/password.

Never gonna stop.

At both Everlane (http://everlane.com) and Dev Bootcamp (http://devbootcamp.com) we made a conscious decision early on not to call our customers "users."

It's a surprisingly hard habit to break, but it's important. Being specific clarifies your priorities and adds a level of responsibility.

At DBC, our students are our customers, for example. Treating them like customers acknowledges that they're paying us a lot of money to change their lives. When you're saying "student" and "customer" all day it's easier to focus on what the real problems are.

I don't think it's a big issue. I agree with this blog post from 2004:

> We think "users" is exactly the right word. It makes the USER the important thing. The one who cares about USEability and USEfullness, two words we really like. We don't care if we make fans. We aren't even motivated to create customers. We believe that if you can do things in such a way that you help people become passionate users, the rest takes care of itself.

http://headrush.typepad.com/creating_passionate_users/2004/1...

No, "user" is a great word if you're talking about what it's like to use the product, and how to improve the experience of using it. A word like "buyer" or "seller" might be better in some cases, but risk being to narrow, because a seller for instance will occasionally have other goals in the app then just doing a sale.

Similarly, "user" is probably not a great word when you're talking about business, because your customers do more than just use the app.

I don't mind being both a user and a customer and an individual, depending on who's talking about me in what context.

This almost seems like a dismissal of your users. As he says, square has two types of user: buyer and seller. Only the seller is really square's customer, by the traditional definition of that word. By dropping the term user, and only talking about customers, it seems like the buyer might end up getting neglected.

When your boss asks you a question like "how does this impact the customer", you tend to only think about the people who pay you money, not the other strange definitions of customer that jack might have invented.

I've felt this way about being called a "consumer" for a long time and have avoided businesses that label me as such. I say this is a good call.

I've always felt the term was neutral. You could put a user on a pedestal, or condescend to them.

In any case, I don't think using "customer" as a replacement is necessarily enlightened or inspired. There's got to be a more creative term.

But then, that might just give rise to another esoteric buzzword, and I'd rather not have that either.

I'm just going to stick with "user".

Big +1. Users as a term radically homogenizes people you're supposed to be building for. I came to the same conclusion a couple years ago: http://corvusconsulting.ca/2010/08/no-more-users/

I've stopped calling my customers "users" since I heard Jeff Veen say, back at an Adaptive Path seminar in 2004, "there are only two businesses that call its customers 'users'."

It pithily drove the point home for me: I had never been designing for users, but people.

On the social network I run, I call them members. I think it's a lot nicer than users. I also sometimes refer to them as musicians (since it's a site for musicians).

If I called them customers, they'd think I were trying to sell them something... which I'm not.

Before I go any further, I would like to make it known I really like Jack Dorsey as a person and entrepreneur. He is a smart visionary who possess's the same kind of entrepreneurial spirit that many of us here possess as well but this is one of the silliest things I have ever read.

Why does it matter what you call the people that use your services? They are users of the service. You are providing a service for users. For example: John Doe goes to a store and they use Square, John pays for his product via the merchant using Square — John is a customer, the retailer is a user of the Square service. It's not like John (the customer) is paying Square directly just for the privilege of being able to pay for his particular item via a credit card.

The word users works, lets not over-think this. As long as you are providing exceptional services and exceptional support you could call us cretins for all I care.

Pick something that describes the activity. At Shopify we refer to our users as Merchants. They have their own Customers. We also have Partners with partner accounts which further branch into Affiliates, Designers, Developers.

I think it's completely contextual. We call our users 'members' at Fotoblur, since we're a community. When I was in college working as a waiter one restaurant insisted we never call customers 'customers' but 'guests.'

Some people are both customer and user. Some are only one of those. There is a database modeling pattern for that. And then there is an infinity of roles - customer and user are just two of those.

Did the term user ever exist in this context before? Thinking about it it seems right when talking inside baseball, but not when writing copy for your business.

Whether it's customer or user, the experience better rock! Less time on semantics and more on great products that people want to use.

At least he isn't calling their users "consumers". Dammit I hate that word and whichever MBA put it into the standard lexicon.

> If I ever say the word “user” again, immediately charge me $140.

$140... 140 characters. Subtle jab at Twitter?

One customer could have multiple users.

Agents might be more accurate.

Why are we talking about this?

#biggerproblems

This is the reason Jack is the modern day Steve Jobs.

#bindersofusers

>“Why do you all call your customers ‘users’?”

We don't, we call our users "users". They are the product we are selling to our customers. We call our customers "customers". Why is he taking such a stupid question as a call to change the way he thinks instead of just answering it?

>No one wants to be thought of as a “user”

Excuse me? I am perfectly content with being thought of as a user of site X when I am a user of site X. I am not a customer of google's, I am a user of their search engine. I am not a customer of HNs, I am a user. If you don't care about your users, then fix that problem, don't try to pretend the word is the problem.