Users or Readers? – The user-centered design process

Practicing user-centered design means focusing on people’s targets. This means keeping people’s goals, desires, and ways of working firmly in mind. It means that while readers are of course still reading, users are those who are the active participants on the net.

Isn’t this just vocabulary? Well yes … and no.

Writing for users orients copy towards action. While reading is still very much a part of using the web, using the web is much more than just reading. It’s about gathering information, posing questions, posting replies, providing information, navigating, choosing information within information, purchasing, selling, viewing, visiting, rotating, scanning, skimming, listening, clipping, saving, and of course, reading. As the web matures, we’ll see an even further diversity of web-based behavior.

So what does being “user-centered” mean? In a nutshell, being user-centered means keeping the focus squarely on results. The central question should always be: How is the copy being used?

The user is “on the web” for a reason, even if it’s a vague or ill-defined reason. The content provider too is providing content for a reason. The copywriter needs to give language to the interface between the two.

Or course, if imparting information in a linear fashion is the goal, then by all means the copy should focus on content designed to mimic the act of reading a book. The same goes for those searching for or providing pure reading pleasure. But if this is not the intended goal, designing web copy as print-based copy is an ill-informed venture.

Web content needs to be responsive to people’s tasks. The user interacts with the site and with the web as a whole. The interface is where this meeting happens. Understanding the web audience as a group of users means keeping web content functional. Form follows function. When you broaden how your content is supposed to function, you bring in a rich variety of writing forms.

And that’s the beauty of writing for the web.

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