A few days ago, Jimmy Guterman over at O’Reilly Radar put up a last appeal to drop the word “user” from the internet business vernacular. It seems that as an editor he had been discouraging the use of the term, but got hung up rewriting the phrase “user-generated content.” Responding to his appeal for alternatives, most of the comments on his post indicate that the rest of us are complacent with our “user” label. Here are my reactions to the proposed substitutions:
- “Member” : to me, a member is someone who paid a membership fee. I have a Google account, but I’m not a Google Member, whereas the $100 I send to the MFA every year makes me a Member.
- “Viewer” : TV has already claimed this, so why stretch it to the internet.
- “Visitor”, “Guest” : this holds the connotation of not having a username at the site, and in that context it works well.
- “Student”, “Photographer”, etc : to label your users based on your site content seems intuitive, but that only really works with your “pro” users. The casual ones often don’t deserve the term: I have a Flickr account, but I’m no photographer.
- “Customer”, “Consumer”, “Client” : at a retail site this makes a lot of sense, but to be honest I think “Consumer” has exactly the same ugly-word feel that “User” does.
- “Participant”, “Contributor” : I “use” YouTube, but I’ve never uploaded a video, so I don’t feel I deserve this label either.
- “Author, “Artist”, etc : again, this applies to content creators which make up a very slim slice of a site’s user-base.
- “Person” : too blasé, but as general as User, I suppose. This seemed to have the largest following among commenters, although I’m not sure I agree. We all know we are people, so why point it out with the label? And it doesn’t verb well, either.
- “Patron” : too old-school for the internet.
- “Tester” : nice pun for sites in perpetual beta, but (like most wisecracks) falls short in the long run.
- “Actor” : I’m not too excited by this one either, although I don’t have much experience in building use cases. “Use” cases, hmm.
Plurals
- “People” : see Person.
- “Community” : true, although many sites are not communities. “Community-generated content” does have a nice ring to it, though.
My vote? Stick with “User” and if you need to differentiate within that, “Guest”, “Member”, and “Contributor” represent fairly wide coverage. The word fits on so many levels, and for those of us who don’t associate it with drug-culture or try to pre-pend the letter “L” its not too objectionable. It would be interesting to see a breakdown of the objectors by age, too, because I suspect there is a generational disconnect with the term.
