I certainly agree that the customer may not be the (end) user, and that any (usability) testing should involve end users.
However, if the initiating post's claim that "non-consumer products don't need user testing" should withstand, the user is not a consumer but rather an organisation, most often referred to as a customer (from the perspective of the software vendor). But then again, "end-user" would be the better term in any case. A user-centered design (and development) process is usually a good idea - if you want your application to be usable to it's end users, that is. Asbjørn 2009/8/26 Milan Guenther <[email protected]> > > On Wed, August 26, 2009 08:18, Asbjorn wrote: > > "Consumers" don't equal "users". > > "Customers" do. > > Not always: for example, Oracle's customer is an organisation represented > by some manager, who decides to buy that large ERP suite to solve a > business problem, while users are actually just users or "end users". They > don't equal customers, more so employees, business partners, job > candidates or whatever. > > By the way, in the German software development community, there is a > distinction between "Anwender" and "Benutzer", both translated as "user". > But the first one is someone buying a software to solve a problem not > necessarily directly using it, the second is someone actually interacting > with the product. They are the same only if the person involved is a > consumer/private person. (http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benutzer) > > Milan > > -- > ||| | | |||| || |||||||| | || | || > milan guenther * interaction design > p +49 173 2856689 * www.guenther.cx > > ________________________________________________________________ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ....... [email protected] Unsubscribe ................ http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines ............ http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .................. http://www.ixda.org/help
