An ex-vianteer colleague of mine, Richard Anderson, has recently asked the, seemingly perpetual question in the UX, XD, CX, usability, user engineering, user centered community
It’s been famously quoted, i think by Tufte, that the only industries to that calls its major contituents “users” is designers and drug dealers.
I’ve chosen the term customer experience because I’m trying to think like a marketer, and I believe more companies will be interested in “customer experience” than they will be in “user experience”, customers just spend more money than users 
In many ways its an issue of branding and positioning, in the seminal book “selling the invisible” the point is made, that positioning your business to be all things to all people is suicide, and in the end you need to pick a positioning the marketplace. In some ways all the designers fretting about this term are like small business people fretting that if they “commit” to a particular service they will lose out on the lucrative side projects that are not covered by there “narrow market focus.” In ‚Äúselling the invisible‚Äù it gives the fantastic example of an airline, SAS I think, that decided that it was going to mold itself into the “business peoples airline”. Well you can imagine the wailing and gnashing of teeth, of people saying “what about all the tourist business we will lose, no one is going to fly for pleasure on the business peoples airline”. Well as it turns out SAS did very well as the business peoples airline, and successfully sold all the profitable business class seats, which enabled them to discount the coach seats, and they ended up with a successful airline that catered to business and tourist travelers. In essence, the “business persons airline” benefited from a halo effect where by doing one thing well they were able to serve another area very well.
Just because I talk about customer experience, doesn’t preclude me working on intranets.
Interesting side note, here’s a post from Peter Merholz on a similar topic Whither user Experience and credits Don Norman in the early 80’s with coining the term “user experience”
I think your sentence “customers just spend more money than users” exposes the main reason why ‘users’ may be a more appropriate term than ‘customers’. When designing a product, the designer must consider the people using it and that is not necessarily the person paying for it. Who are Google’s customers? The advertisers. Who should Google be designed for? The users.
I think by pulling that sentance out your missing the context of what i’m trying to say. I know ‘user’ is a more ‘accurate’ term, what i’m saying is ‘customer’ is narrowing the focus of my specialization and therefore making my services more ‘attractive’ to people who want to design ‘customer experiences’, hence user is not more appropriate if I’m intersted in designing for custoemers. I personally think that Customer experience, customer lifecycle etc just has more equity in the marketplace. I’m saying designers should stop trying to be accurate in describing what they do, and put a marketing and branding hat on when they sell what they do.
It’s Peter Merholz not Peter Morville. And I suggest linking directly to the piece:
http://www.peterme.com/index112498.html
Ooops, sorry Peter
Fixed!
Thx,
Karl
I had an interesting talk with Simona Maschi (IVREA professor) at INDEX: about this, and she suggested something that I have been applying to my work since that talk. At IVREA they do not talk about user-centric design, but rather people-centric design. For me that’s a much more fitting definition, but do you really need to add user to user experience design, why not just say experience design? That’s a bit more profound I think.
I have to agree with Mark, ‘users’ don’t always see themselves as customers (and in fact reject the term as ‘window dressing’) But it depends on the context. The sort of ‘users’ I deal with are people in organisations who have been required to use technology as part of their jobs. They relate to the concept ‘user’ in the sense ‘the poor sucker who is using this defective system..”, whereas ‘customer’ doesn’t do much for them (except to provoke in some the question “you mean I have to pay for this support”
But you are also right that ‘user’ is a generally perjorative term. I used to do computer support for the police, and they DID NOT like to have have the term applied to them at all. We tried all sort of alternatives, the closest we got was ‘Client’ , but we always ended up with confusion between the ‘contract Client’ (eg the company) and the individuals we were supporting.
The answer in the end was to use the word properly (to go back to basics), and talk about ’system users’ . I liked that because it hooked into the concept that these people were using the system (or the facility or whatever), and I could focus my people (on the service delivery side) on getting things right with the system AS WELL AS with the users of the system.
Interesting how we ‘contract’ (as in shrink) language, then find it unsatisfactory, then look for some substitute word that is ‘more appropriate’ , ‘less offensive’, or (in this case) ‘less tainted”. But I’ve never been a fan of contracting language, why say in one word (unclearly) what you can say in ten (clearly). Cheers, JMc