Should we change the name UX (user experience) to HX (human experience)

[Mircea]

Are we using outdated terminology?

Interesting article about using more human centred terminology

https://uxdesign.cc/so-long-user-experience-hello-human-experience-b3ee694e6fa3

[aschrijver]

Nice! I fully agree. I didn’t see that article, but posted on another (private) forum, using the same terminology. There were some other aspects I touched on then. I’ll quote the relevant parts:

---

I was watching a great video by Max Stossel of the Center for Humane Technology, about the many ways in which our mobile phones, online applications and especially games are designed to absorb as much of our attention as possible. There are totally misaligned goals of the designers versus the consumers in this, and the products that result are not to our interest and benefit.

Old news, same old same old, of course.

But it triggered an idea. Max showed an example of the extremely popular game ‘Fortnite’ at 10:35 in the video, where a Fortnite UX researcher proudly explains how well Variable Rewards work to get people addicted, and then demonstrates how they have incorporated this in the form of ‘lootboxes’ that give random rewards, throughout the game. BTW, here is the video: We’ve Been Sneaking Into Your Brains.

All in all really unethical, right?

But what if you applied the same techniques to get peoples’ attention back to the real world? And you would not be secret about it, because there’s no need. Instead its positive and beneficial through and through. […] Still unethical? I don’t think so, especially if it is transparent and all-voluntary. […]

I find ‘behaviour design’ an awful terminology. It implies manipulation. In new terminology I’d like to talk about Behaviour encouragement design (BED?). And in real-life we don’t have ‘users’, so since we deal with ‘improving the experience of life’, and we use online User Experience (UX) to engage with real life, we can adopt the terminology of Real life experience (RLX, pronounced “Relax”). […]

[Free]

I agree too. Part of my work is human experience design and I’ll be using that term from now. Thanks for the idea.

I already always use the terms “people” or “visitors” etc. instead of “users” or “traffic”.

[loundy]

Oh I’m so with you!! Readup (the company I co-founded) doesn’t have “users.” Instead, we’re Readers.

I wrote a blog post about it.

[hans]

Instead of UX or HX, I propose DDX: Dumbed-Down Experience.

This is after years of noticing that many websites are being dumbed-down.

It’s become obvious that “UX” “designers” think that this is their job now.