I’m tired of calling it User Experience. And I don’t think that Customer Experience is a great compromise either. They both tend to encourage thinking about people as one-dimensional objects rather than the impossibly complex design challenge humans actually represent. In the prevailing lexicon, they are either the faceless beings using a piece of technology on which we are currently focused (perhaps worse, the glimmering stock-photoed, impossibly perfect and perfectly shallow personas we engineer). Or they are our customers. Both, the monolithic constructs of unnecessarily limited imaginations.

The app, site or touchpoint we are thinking about, is a small part of any person’s collective experience. And I can’t imagine that even the biggest brand fan thinks of themselves as solely your customer, except in very brief moments…and probably when they are aggrieved.

Our designs and products will exist in the much broader context and landscape of people’s lives–amidst all of the chaos, struggle, progress, glory and the general messiness of too many things competing for too little available attention. We are probably the tiniest sliver of that panorama. So, while I’m not generally concerned about wordsmithing as an exercise in being nice and protecting people’s feelings, perhaps acknowledging the broader reality will expand my thinking, even if just a bit. I need all the help I can get uncovering blindspots.

And, yes, I’m part of the problem too. While I have never been a huge fan of the term user, it rolls right off my tongue 100 times a day. And I’m using the tags in this post to increase reach. I’m using user, in a sense.

So let’s see how this grand experiment goes.

That is all.