Thursday, May 31, 2018

web app - What is a good name for non-administrator users?


Not sure if this is the proper place for this question. In my opinion, it is related to user experience, but please correct me if I'm wrong.


If you have a site/application that separate users with admin-access (the right to change settings, add new users etc.) from those who do not have admin-access (basically only have read access to the data). It's quite easy to name those with admin-access and just call them "Administrators", but what would you call those without admin-access? I'm looking for a word, both to use in the UI and within specs and code, to separate the two types of users.


I thought of names like "Normal", "Regular", "Ordinary" and so forth, but non of them feel right. They all have some sort of negative or undesirable tone, I believe. Just calling them "User" doesn't seem right either, as users with admin-access are users as well.


I'd love some input on a name, where the purpose of it is clear, but without adding some sort of undesired value.


Update:


The context I'm facing is similar to the one of Google Analytics. A user can create a user account, and then work with one or many applications associated with her account. For some of the applications she might be an Administrator, for some she might not.


Looking through the terminology used by Google Analytics, they call the users either Administrator or User, so that seems to be an established terminology and might not be that bad, but I'm not entirely sold, so any better suggestion is appreciated.


At the moment I'm leaning towards the suggestion by Peter, to name the role based on what they do (something related to viewing statistics about the app).



Answer




What's your app about? There is probably some natural term from the domain. For example, if it was a forum that might be "member". For this site we might call ourselves UXers, designers (oh, hell, I've opened a huge can of worms there!).


The other thing to think about is roles instead of users. For example, I have an application which has a workflow in several distinct stages. The first step is known as collection, so users who perform that role are called collectors. The next step is assembly, so users there are called assemblers and so on. But in fact quite a few users are both collectors and assemblers. As it happens there are also admins, but that's just another role in the system. So the term we use varies throughout the system depending on the role the user is performing in that part of the system.


In my application if we want to talk about the permissions system itself then, yes we fall back to the word users - e.g. users can only access those parts of the system for which they have permission. But for the team using that application we rarely talk about "users", typically we're more specific.


No comments:

Post a Comment

technique - How credible is wikipedia?

I understand that this question relates more to wikipedia than it does writing but... If I was going to use wikipedia for a source for a res...