What’s Wrong with ”Users”

The term “user” is quite pervasive in software engineering discussions and documents when referring to individuals that interact with a given software system. Unfortunately, since there can be many different categories of “users”, with different goals and different ways of interacting with software, this term tends to obscure these important distinctions. To a large part, this problem can be attributed to the unique culture of software programming – which emphasizes code to the exclusion of other important considerations. In this keynote talk, we explore the nature of this culture and overview some innovative software engineering methods and research initiatives designed to avoid these issues.