Personas, Not Users: Avoiding Legacy Terminology
The famous afficionado and opponent of personal privacy Mark Zuckerberg recently admonished his entourage and minions to avoid the word “user” in future.
“We need to stop calling people users,” he said. “They’re not just there to use our products; we’re here to build things for them.”
We feel Zuckerberg’s right about this. Don Norman has advanced the same idea. But neither Norman nor Zuckerberg has suggested any more useful alternative than “people,” and there’s a risk of throwing out the baby with the bathwater. The division between users, admins, and devs – and the connotation that users are second-class citizens – traces back almost to the dawn of computing, and sits close to its roots. If we abandon “user,” what happens to terms like “user interface” and “user experience”?
The solution’s pretty easy, and comes from an unexpected source.
We’re not the first to see the potential in this marketing idea.
You can’t kill the “users” tradition, but you can easily subclass it.
Specific Rather Than Generalized Users
Here’s why this is an interesting way for a company like Facebook to look at the people who use their apps and their sites.
A small business owner on Facebook probably wants something completely different than a global mega-corporation’s marketing department does. Both want something different than the person who conducts their social life through Facebook. Many (probably most) of the teenagers who use Facebook hate it, but use it because modern helicopter parenting means they rarely have any opportunity to socialize with their peers in person. It’s not a coincidence that they want something different out of Facebook than their parents do. Compare that to what Facebook means for people who use it to reconnect with old friends from high school, or for large extended families which are spread across the globe. Imagine how the Facebook experience might differ for single people vs. married people.
You can tell Facebook hasn’t integrated this thinking yet, not just because of some painful mistakes the company’s made, but also because it doesn’t yet have a “ban baby pictures” button. They have the technology, but they don’t seem to have noticed the very, very consistent feedback.A screenshot of Google’s aggregated best guess about what the entire internet thinks of Facebook baby pictures. Facebook’s facial recognition software works incredibly well, and could automatically recognize and screen out baby pictures. It appears that this would be a widely beloved new feature. Note also the “People” menu, instead of “Users,” for logging in and out of various accounts, in the upper-right-hand corner. It’s well-meaning, and an improvement, but still misses its mark, because there isn’t a one-to-one correlation between people and the accounts they use.
How do Facebook’s users feel about seeing baby pictures? If Google’s correct, they hate it, but I’d guess that the truth’s more subtle. I imagine single people in general mostly hate it, single heterosexual women between 29 and 31 absolutely hate it, grandparents adore it, and teenagers don’t care either way - but that’s all just a guess. The great thing about breaking personas out by demographics is that the practice emerged from market research, and pairs very readily with it. Google’s autocorrect functions as a very coarse-grained mode of market research; the real thing can give you a lot more detail.
And this isn’t just for Facebook. Every social network has more than one type of user. SoundCloud has musicians, DJs, and fans. YouTube has creators and viewers, and each side of that divide further subdivides by audience. On a site which features how-to videos, music, comedy, and so on, there’s a lot of different personas. Just about every dating web site out there presents the same user interface for both women and men, despite the fact that these two user categories see very different behavior through that one consistent interface. (Also despite the fact that women and men are not always looking for each other, and indeed despite the fact that quite a few edge cases exist.) Nearly everyone who uses GitHub is a developer, but consider the developer who closes 25 pull requests a day, every day, and all on one project. He or she uses the site very differently than the developer who visits occasionally to file an issue or compare a few different libraries to choose the best one.
The producer/consumer split seen with the GitHub, SoundCloud, and YouTube examples probably exists in a lot of other places, and is one of the more obvious subcategories. Likewise, software’s had a concept of “users vs. power users” for generations. Twitter, GitHub, and several other sites support power users with keyboard shortcuts. Male vs. female is another really obvious distinction. But it’s not about binary splits; it’s about understanding your user base, and the best way to do that is with personas and Venn diagrams.
