Why We Stopped Calling Them "Users"

There's a moment in every project where we catch ourselves doing it — that default industry habit of talking about "users." The word appears everywhere: user flows, user testing, user personas. It's the shorthand web teams rely on because it's convenient and tidy. But after building hundreds of sites, we realized something uncomfortable: every time we said "user," we were distancing ourselves from the very people we were trying to help.

A user is abstract. A user is theoretical. A user doesn't have a name, a goal, a deadline, a mood, or a reason for visiting a site at 10:30 on a Wednesday night after a long meeting. But the people who land on our clients' websites? They're not abstract at all. They're navigating a problem. They're carrying something with them — pressure, uncertainty, curiosity, confusion, excitement. When you call them "users," all of that disappears.

The shift didn't happen overnight. It happened slowly, almost accidentally, as we spent more time learning how people actually interact with the sites we build. We'd sit with clients and watch someone struggle to find a form buried one level too deep. We'd listen to customers explain why a page "felt" easier to read even when nothing obvious had changed. We'd hear from teams who said the site made their workday faster simply because the information was finally laid out in a way that made sense. These weren't users. They were people with very real stories and constraints.

Once you start seeing them that way, you can't go back to the generic language.

It changes the decisions you make. Instead of asking, "What will the user do next?" you start asking, "What would a person expect here if they were tired or rushed?" You think differently about spacing, wording, and timing. You stop trying to impress and start trying to reassure. You stop designing for personas and start planning for actual behaviour.

It shifts the tone of the writing, too. Pages stop sounding like they're talking at someone. They start sounding like they're talking to someone. When we build for Chemsynergy, for example, we're thinking about the procurement manager checking specs between meetings.  When we build for Gridiron Power, we picture the homeowner comparing options late in the day, trying to understand which product actually solves their problem. These people don't see themselves as "users." They're simply trying to get something done.

Removing the word also changes how we work internally. When you stop calling them users, it becomes tough to hide behind jargon or shortcuts. You're forced to think about clarity. You're reminded that loading speed isn't a technical metric — it's the difference between someone completing a task or giving up. Accessibility stops being a compliance box and becomes a responsibility to people who interact with the world in different ways. Everything becomes a little more intentional.

It's not that the term "user" is wrong. It's just too small. It flattens people into a category when what you really need, especially in modern web design, is genuine empathy — not the post-it-note version where teams write fictional bios and tape them to a whiteboard. Empathy means paying attention to what frustrates people, what energizes them, and what they don't have time for. It means building websites that respect someone's time and attention rather than demanding it.

We've found that when you stop calling them users, you get better work. You make quieter decisions that add up to better outcomes: a more precise heading, a shorter form, a more predictable menu, a page that doesn't make someone think twice. None of those changes wins awards, but they win trust. And trust is the real currency online.

So we dropped the word. Not officially — it still sneaks in from time to time — but philosophically. We build for people now. People with limited time. People who are making decisions. People who don't want to fight through a website to accomplish something simple.

The work gets better when you think of them that way. The writing gets clearer. The experience gets easier. The web becomes less of a maze and more of a conversation.

And at the end of the day, that's all a website really is — a conversation between two people. One offering something, the other trying to understand it. When you remember that, the decisions get easier, the outcomes get stronger, and the word "user" starts to feel like a relic from another era.