The User 

A few weeks back I was casually visiting my brother, and we got to talking about email. He'd just finished off his Master's Degree in Leadership, a program he completed about 80% online in a distance learning program. Alex's thesis on leadership in community gardening involved a lot of interchange with his adviser over the internet. He's a very social guy, and reasonably technically savvy. He has a problem. Turns out that with his email completed he was going to need another email account because the university account would eventually expire. He does have email for his day job, but he needs a personal one. I offer a simple solution... why don't you sign up for a gmail account? This is when he says, "I NEVER sign up for anything online".

I was stunned. Honestly, I was actually aware that my mouth was agape.

User Experience Food For Thought

In the aftermath of my genuine shock I've begun to piece together some thoughts about why I was knocked off guard and what this means to someone like me. I make my living designing web sites and software... tools that are all about communication, social engagement, and online interaction. I've thought nothing of throwing a user in the path of an oncoming sign-up form.

I reason that I have it figured out pretty well from a user experience perspective... show the benefits, keep the form light and get the user on their way. I'm cavalier about this because I sign up for things three times a week, minimum. I've long ago given up on illusions of online privacy and over the fear of being spammed. I have over a dozen email addresses, and have accounts on facebook, LinkedIn, twitter, mySpace, Get Satisfaction, a half dozen virtual worlds, Delicious, Digg, Library Thing, ping.fm, Flickr, Epicurious.com, Google, Yahoo, Blurtit, Hootsuite, Flux, Compete.com and something called publicsquare that I have forgotten all about until now. There are more, newsletters, work accounts, collaboration software, wikis, the sign-in for a couple of podcasts I'm involved in, 2 mailing lists I administer, my car coop reservation service, travel accounts, Amazon.com, eBay, REI.... and more. And yes, I use about 3 different passwords for all of them, which is more than most users have.

User Assumptions Can't Be Made

To be fair, I'm a user experience designer, and part of my job is to sign up for social media sites. But part of my job is also to empathize with the people who use our products and the sites we work so hard to design to be useful, pleasurable, and valuable. So when Alex said NEVER, I GOT, in a particularly acute way, how we can't make assumptions about who our users are and what they'll do.

I get to call myself a User Experience professional, and we like to think of that as a discipline. And, yeah, we do have a lot of tools and methods at our disposal to design what we hope will be a great user experience. But we don't ever really HAVE or fully KNOW any other user's experience. It's their experience. And we can't forget that no matter how much we think we can fashion or influence that, the experience will always belong to the user. What we can do, is get that simple fact, and every day, as part of our jobs, care about that. Care a lot about that.