In a recent podcast interview, I spoke with cultural anthropologists Mike Youngblood and Ben Chesluk to reflect on how frequently designers often misrepresent (or misunderstand) who or what a “user” really is. Drawing on years of academic and industry experience, the two authors of Rethinking Users advocate for a broad, systemic view of design; they propose new definitions for user archetypes that better reflect the complexity of real human relationships, which, in turn, impact how people interact with a system.

Quotes have been edited for clarity and brevity.

Meet Mike and Ben, Authors of Rethinking Users

Mike Youngblood and Ben Chesluk both hold PhDs in cultural anthropology, but their careers have extended far beyond the university setting. Mike began his career as an academic studying social movements in South Asia before transitioning to a technology company, where he began to apply ethnographic research to product development. Ben’s career has similarly spanned a wide variety of contexts ranging from medical-device design, to urban-development projects like the redevelopment of Times Square.

Their paths crossed at the Stanford d.school, where they both taught graduate students about the value of anthropological research. This experience inspired them to cowrite the book Rethinking Users: The Design Guide to User Ecosystem Thinking in collaboration with illustrator and designer Nadeem Haidary.

The Problem with the Traditional “User”

In most UX frameworks, the “user” is imagined as a single, intentional actor interacting with a product. This simplified model is baked into personas, user journeys, and design-thinking templates. But, as Mike explained, this lens misses much of what’s really happening in the user environment.

Mike:

Whether we feel it to be correct or not, the notion that’s really lodged in our heads as designers and design researchers is this sort of 1-to-1, very intentional relationship—almost a hermetically sealed relationship. It exists in isolation of everything else around it, between an acting subject — a human being — and an inert object—a thing… a design. And it just didn’t fit with what we were seeing in the world around us.

For example, consider a surgical tool. It’s tempting to frame the surgeon as the sole user. But in practice, a successful surgery depends on an entire team: nurses, scrub techs, anesthesiologists, and even maintenance staff who prepare and sterilize equipment.

Ben pointed out that each of these actors interacts with the tool in different ways, shaping the outcomes.

Ben:

There are all of these people who had to be able to hand the tools in and out of the surgical field. They had to calibrate them, prepare them, get them in the room, and then take them away, clean them later, or get rid of them. And it wasn’t that frequent, but surgeries [would] break down and just come to a halt if one of those people hadn’t been able to have an effective relationship with that tool, even though it wasn’t designed for them, and the people designing it might not have ever really even thought about that role.

The impact of design decisions ripples far beyond the intended primary user, and the best design considers organic relationships people may have with each other, with their physical spaces, in addition to the digital products they’re using, as part of what makes a successful interaction. In other words, context matters.

User Ecosystems

To capture this complexity, Mike and Ben propose a model of user-ecosystem thinking, which is rooted in systems theory.

User-ecosystem thinking focuses on interconnected roles and relationships, rather than on users as isolated individuals.

User ecosystems include not just the obvious primary “users,” but also all individuals who directly interact with a product or are indirectly affected by it, even without being aware of it (like a patient in an operating room).

Mike:

[The term] “ecosystem” was something we felt we really needed because we wanted to look at collections of experiences, as well as the meta experience that’s being created at a systemic level […] Because, [when] you think about that [noisy] train car or the operating theater, there is an emergent experience at a systemic level that’s sort of the “whole,” as well as individual experiences. [It’s] like the Brazilian rainforest […] where everything has its role and creates the total.

Mike and Ben tend to rely on user archetypes, which categorize relationships by function rather than identity. Unlike personas, which often rely on demographics and personality traits, archetypes emphasize the role someone plays in a system — and how that role interacts with other parts of a system. Their book features many different examples of user archetypes, as they consider the specific relationships in the ecosystems they’re designing for.

AI Requires Rethinking the Human–Technology Relationship

As AI and smart devices proliferate, the boundaries between people and technology are getting blurrier. A smart doorbell, for instance, involves not just the homeowner, but also delivery drivers, visitors, and data-processing systems — possibly even law enforcement. Technology is no longer just used by humans; it also has agency to interact with and for humans.

This leads to the emergence of what Mike and Ben call the autonomic user. In Mike’s words:

Mike:

[The autonomic user] is where a user [and] the technology and tools that the user supposedly uses […] are so deeply intermingled with the very being of the user, that it’s hard to differentiate [between] the user and object, or subject and object. They’re just a single whole. And we think that sort of “cyborg-ization” of the user experience is going to be more and more common as time goes on.

While the proliferation of generative AI feels recent, these trends towards automation have been around for decades. Most notably, intelligent assistants have already had a small degree of agency to act on a user’s behalf.

These increasingly entangled relationships challenge traditional UX concepts like “user” needs or workflows, requiring more nuanced models of interaction.

The notion of technology as a static product is not just outdated, but increasingly inaccurate, especially as tools become more dynamic and malleable and take on the responsibility of smaller-scale decision making. Comfort with systems thinking — which considers how people, technology, and processes all fit together — is more crucial than ever, as teams build increasingly interconnected systems and processes where people collaborate with AI tools.

Ben:

We ended up creating [an] exercise we call “active artifacts,” which is really trying to envision ways that the things that we’re designing become, themselves, things that have active relationships, that are users in themselves.

Anthropology for UX

Anthropology has long embraced the idea that understanding context isn’t just a helpful supplement to core understanding, it is core understanding. As Mike notes, one of anthropology’s core principles is to “make the strange familiar and make the familiar strange.”

As UX professionals know, what is true for us may not always be true for others. Ethnographic methods, like direct observation and contextual inquiry, are already common in UX research. But Mike and Ben argue that designers should further adopt an anthropological mindset: questioning assumptions, mapping power dynamics, and tracing how people adapt products in unpredictable ways.

This mindset allows teams to stay curious and open to new information — a critical skill in an AI era where sycophancy and bias frequently lead to negative (and costly) outcomes. By looking beyond the obvious and considering long-term, systemic effects, designers can build more inclusive and resilient systems and make smarter choices in the long run.

Listen to the Full Interview

To hear Mike, Ben, and me discuss user-ecosystem thinking and the value of anthropology in modern design work, listen to our full podcast episode:

For more thought-provoking conversations about current UX topics, subscribe to the NN/g UX Podcast.

References

Youngblood, M. and Chesluk, B. 2020. Rethinking Users: The Design Guide to User Ecosystem Thinking. BIS Publishers, Netherlands.