"You're Not the User!"

It's the battle cry of all UXers: "You are not the user!" I couldn't possibly count the number of times the UXers at my company have sat around the table complaining about someone who blatantly considered themselves the user and they were to us soooo obviously not the user. Why didn't they see it?

One time while I conducted a design workshop with my team. As part of my initial presentation, I had a slide that was that single statement: Remember, you are not the user.

I had a manager pipe up, "But John is a user!" John was one of our business representatives. "He's been doing the job for years." I had to back pedal. You can't not recognize someone's experience especially when they're in upper management.

This was my first realization that people don't take our battle cry very well, especially in the enterprise world. Many people who work in management have come up from our branches. Even the CEO at my company started out as a messenger at a local branch. Whether we realize it or not we really come off as being rather rude. And I can cry, "You're not the user" to developers til I'm blue in the face and it will make little difference.

Then a couple years back I went to Usability Day at the UW. Jason Civjan gave a great speech about loving your process, not your product. He talked for a couple minutes about how important objectivity is to UX and I had an ah-ha moment. That's what "You're not the user" is all about. We're trying to tell people to be objective, to take themselves out of the equation.

As UXers we need to stop, just stop, using the phrase. It alienates the people with whom we are trying to develop relationships. Instead:

Make "We need to be objective!" your battle cry.
Explain to your team why being objective is so important.

Consider it an opportunity to educate your colleagues more about UX, about how our biases can make our applications less effective, less able to support our employees' tasks and process and in the long run costs the company money.

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