A few days ago I advocated using the word “human” in place of “user” when thinking about crafting experiences. In short, such language would make it easier to remember we are making things that people will enjoy or value, especially in relation to the Minimum Human Experience (as opposed to the Minimum Viable Product). Rather than first focusing on optimizing the numbers flowing into an analytics system, we should instead ask what it is that actual humans would want.

Today I came across the most striking example I’ve seen yet of an experience decidedly not human:

Badges. For reading the news. Really. You can earn badges by reading certain kinds of news.

Who wants this?

This feature was created not by thinking about humans but rather by thinking about metrics and advertisers—gamification increases metrics such as number of page hits per session and frequency of sessions. Quantifying readers’ interests is beneficial to advertisers—if they know I’m interested in certain kinds of news, that is a valuable bit of targeting data (though they’d know that anyway, so the badges seem more about encouraging me to click more links). When people say that Google is an engineering-driven organization that doesn’t understand people, this is exactly what they are talking about.

Prediction: we will see increasing apathy and backlash to this kind of wanton use of game mechanics in domains that are neither competitive nor driven by external motivators.

I’m hardly the first person to complain about the word “user” to describe people who do stuff with software. But, in the “User Experience” community it is rare, at best, to see anyone questioning what the “U” in UX stands for. Call it quixotic, but I think the term HX (human experience) would be much better. People don’t think of themselves as “users” and as practitioners we do ourselves a disservice to employ that dehumanizing term. In all other contexts the word “user” is not generally positive and certainly not evocative of the kind of intimate, day-to-day relationship we’d like our work to have with the people who interact with it.

This applies as well to the “Minimum Viable Product” – lately there have been a number of folks pointing out the term “viable” is too often ignored, resulting in the release of products that are simply not ready for human consumption. Perhaps if we all thought of it more as the Minimum Human Experience (hereafter referred to as MHX) we’d be less likely to release products that aren’t ready just to get them rushed out the door and instead focus our thinking on what the smallest coherent and valuable experience for a real person would be.