Nobody calls themselves a user

The people we design for became users, end users and test users. The words are convenient, and they put a distance between us and the people we are talking about.

Geert Valère Allegaert · October 2026 · looking back on user-centered design

Early on, when usability was still new and a little bit cool, I worked for a firm called Using It. We were among the first to test websites and software with real people, and to sell interface design as a service.

I am guilty of what follows. For years, everything I did was user-centered. I wrote reports full of users and end-users. I did user-interviews, end-user-testing, and said the same words in meetings without hearing them. It took me a long time to notice that the reports and the manuals I wrote in the same years were talking to the same people in two different ways. The manual said “you”. The report said “the user”.

Where the word comes from

In computing, user simply meant whoever was using the machine, as opposed to the people who built and ran it. In the shared computers of the 1960s you logged in as a user, got a user account, had user rights. The word was a role in relation to a system, and as such it was accurate.

End user is about as old; dictionaries date it to the first half of the 1960s. It means the last person in a chain, the one the product is finally for, and it lives in another trade as well: an end-user certificate is the document that states where a shipment of weapons will finally end up. In both cases the word looks at people from the far end of a supply line.

Then there is the other meaning, the one everybody hears. A user, in plain English, is also somebody who takes drugs. Dutch has the same double meaning, more strongly still: hij gebruikt, he uses, needs no object to be understood. The joke that follows writes itself, and it is usually credited to Edward Tufte: only two industries call their customers users, software and illegal drugs. I could not find it in anything Tufte wrote. The place it turns up with his name is a book on cybercrime from 2015, which calls him a Yale computer science professor — he is a statistician — and gives no source. It is a good line. It is probably not his.

What the word does

The objection to the word is not that it is rude. It is that it is empty. A user has no task, no hurry, no reason for coming. A reader, a patient, a parent filling in a school form, a man trying to pay a parking fine: each of those words already tells you what they want and what state they are in. “The user” tells you only that they are on the other side of the screen.

Don Norman, whose book User Centered System Design of 1986 helped put the word at the centre of the field, asked in 2008 to get rid of it. His column in Interactions argued that calling people users, customers or consumers turns them into an abstraction, and that it was time to speak of people. Norman is persuasive. It is worth adding that nobody has measured it: there is no study showing that teams who say people make better products than teams who say users. It is an argument about habits of thought, and it should be read as one.

What I can say from my own reports is where the word was most at home. It was in the sentences where somebody was not doing what we had planned. “The user did not find the button.” “The user misunderstood the label.” Written that way, the person is the one who failed, and the button gets off lightly. Rewritten with a name and a task — “Anna was looking for the opening hours and did not see the link” — the same sentence points at the page.

The case for keeping it

There is a good argument on the other side, and it comes from an artist rather than a designer. In 2012 Olia Lialina wrote that dropping the word is not as innocent as it sounds. As computers disappear into smooth devices, she argued, the user disappears too — and with the word goes the reminder that there is a programmed system in front of you, built by somebody else, with rules you did not write. “People” sounds warmer. “User” at least admits that there are two sides and that one of them has the power.

I think she is right, and it narrows the problem rather than ending it. User is the correct word where the relationship to the system is the point: an account, a permission, a right to see what the software does with your data. It is the wrong word where the point is the person and what they came to do. Most design discussion is about the second.

If you want to try it on your own writing, here is what I would change first.

The manual had it right

A manual cannot afford the word. It has to speak to someone who is stuck, with the book open next to the keyboard, and it only works if it talks to them directly. The reports I wrote in the same years could afford it, because the people they described were never going to read them. That, more than any etymology, is what the word gives away: it is how we talk about people when they are not in the room.

Read the originals

• Don Norman, Words matter. Talk about people: not customers, not consumers, not users (2008). The case against the word, from the man who put it at the centre of the field.
• Olia Lialina, Turing Complete User (2012). The case for keeping it: what disappears when the user becomes a person.
• Dictionary.com, end user. The dating of the term, and its second life in the arms trade.