A user is an agent, either a human agent (end-user) or software agent, who uses a computer or network service. A user often has a user account and is identified by a username (also user name), screen name (also screenname), nickname (also nick), or handle, which is derived from the identical Citizen's Band radio term.
Users are also widely characterized as the class of people that use a system without complete technical expertise required to understand the system fully.[1] In hacker-related contexts, such users are also divided into lusers and power users. Both are terms of degradation, but the latter connotes a "know-it-all" attitude.
In projects in which the actor of the system is another system or a software agent, it is quite possible that there is no end-user for the system. In this case, the end-users for the system would be indirect end-users.
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The term end-user refers to the ultimate operator of a piece of software, but it is also a concept in software engineering, referring to an abstraction of that group of end-users of computers (i.e. the expected user or target-user). The term is used to distinguish those who only operate the software from the developer of the system, who knows a programming language and uses it to create new functions for end-users.
This abstraction is primarily useful in designing the user interface, and refers to a relevant subset of characteristics that most expected users would have in common. In user-centered design, several fictional Personas are created to represent the archetypal end users, which may include differences concerning which computer interfaces with which each persona is comfortable (due to experience or their inherent simplicity), and the persona's technical expertise and degree of knowledge in specific fields or disciplines.
When few constraints are imposed on the end-user category, especially when designing programs for use by the general public, it is common practice to expect minimal technical expertise or previous training in end users (the general meaning associated with the term end-user).[2] In this context, easy-to-learn GUIs (possibly with a touchscreen) are usually preferred to more sophisticated command line interfaces for the sake of usability.
The end-user development discipline blurs the typical distinction between users and developers. It designates activities or techniques in which people who are not professional developers create automated behavior and complex data objects without significant knowledge of a programming language.
A user's account allows a user to authenticate to system services and be granted authorization to access them; however, authentication does not imply authorization. To log in to an account, a user is typically required to authenticate oneself with a password or other credentials for the purposes of accounting, security, logging, and resource management.
Once the user has logged on, the operating system will often use an identifier such as an integer to refer to them, rather than their username, through a process known as identity correlation. In Unix systems, the username is correlated with a user identifier or user id.
Computer systems are divided into two groups based on what kind of users they have:
User accounts on multi-user systems typically include a home directory, in which to store files pertaining exclusively to that user's activities, which is protected from access by other users (though a system administrator may have access). User accounts often contain a public user profile, which contains basic information provided by the account's owner.
In online communities, screen names can become a mark of persona, some of them acquiring a certain level of fame from the contributions of their holders. Some famous screen names :
Some usability professionals have expressed their dislike of the term "user", proposing it to be changed. [3]
Don Norman has stated:
One of the horrible words we use is "users". I am on a crusade to get rid of the word "users". I would prefer to call them "people".[4]
This article was originally based on material from the Free On-line Dictionary of Computing, which is licensed under the GFDL.