Mar 17, 2022

Replacing “Users” with People

Considering the real world by making human connections

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Have you ever tried to merge in traffic and experienced another driver’s impulse to resist your merge as soon as you put on your turn signal? They speed up and make it clear that your machine is not getting in front of their more important machine.

For me, my polite signal is not enough. I also need eye contact. As soon as our eyes connect, the other person is pulled out of the illusion of a private space in which they must exert power to control. Suddenly the other person is aware of others and their antipathy transforms into empathy. They courteously and generously act to share our shared space and let me into the lane.

This human connection transforms the other car into other driver into fellow human.

Driver is the auto industry’s version of product design’s user. The word user has come to mean a vague and speculative idea of use. In its casual application, I have observed it as a quick designation for when the speaker doesn’t really know who to refer to specifically. The result is often an unconscious loss of empathy from the humans creating the product for the humans who will make use of the product.

A product can be effective at a human level if human qualities, like the natural instinct to feel and react, are used to produce it. And I find that calling another human a user is a barrier that prevents the creators from experiencing human connections as they create.

An approach we’ve taken on Material is to insert “real” people into our working designs. Although they are actually fabricated, we respect these people as real individuals with personalities and lifestyles, who use a constellation of apps—not just the one instance the designer may be focusing on at that moment. By giving a name and a face and a life to a mock-content person, the designer makes eye contact with them and a human connection is made.

Because Material’s design system is product agnostic, meaning we build a system and provide guidance that accommodates many types of products, we are in a position to consider how the many apps individuals use might change person to person based on life experiences. Along with our research efforts to connect with the many human relationships with technology, our designers continuously consider what someone might be reading, scrolling through, and sharing with their social and family circles, as they design. What does their message inbox look like? What music are they listening to? What types of restaurants may they be looking for?

By building a set of holistically considered people to insert into designs and prototypes, and by giving them names and full diverse lives, we are better equipped to consider real world lives and how digital products may impact them.

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Creating people to create for people

When our asset production kicked off for the Material 3 release, it was clear this was an opportunity to both improve the content in our example UIs and illustrate how dynamic theming can differ for everyone. Before I jumped into world-building three new lives to insert into our guideline assets, I established a set of principles to follow so that I created people with thought and care.

Celebrate people who are not ourselves. There is a whole world out there which makes it possible to avoid using examples that are exclusively the interests and locations of the creator. Creators located in Silicon Valley, the Bay Area, or other American coastal cities have a tendency to fill in mock content with their own world view because it’s familiar, easy, and saves time. This centers the creator which does not reflect the reality of diverse life experiences and limits the imagination of possibility.

Celebrate the non-dominant narratives of our society, like non-binary gendering, multiracial & multicultural fluidity, multilingual experiences, non-homogenous interests and style, community-forward occupations, and non-nuclear family structures. Consciously avoid idealized mainstream beauty, body, and age standards and take care to do this authentically to avoid reaffirming stereotypes.

Keep naming flexible so names can work for more than one gender or nationality. A name may have cultural and regional connotations, but people’s lives are much more nuanced. The reality is that people move and travel the world and often take their names with them. It’s also important to do some research to make sure the chosen names are not notable people—good or bad. If the name doesn’t have a Wikipedia or news article, the name usually passes the test.

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Introducing the people in our assets

Our newly created people can be seen in the many assets throughout our new Material 3 guidelines. They each have their own themes in their respective screens demonstrating the capabilities of Material’s new color expression. (All characters and other entities appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons or other real-life entities is purely coincidental.)



Sam Pietersen uses they/them pronouns and expresses their gender as nonconforming or genderless. They speak English, work as an educator, and have a mostly friend-based chosen family. Sam has a reserved personality and spends a lot of time in nature with their support dog, Peanut.



Lee Villnueva uses she/her pronouns and expresses her gender as femme. She is bilingual in English and Spanish, works in healthcare, and has a large extended family. Lee has a casual, laid-back personality and spends a lot of time with her family and at live music events.



Ping Qiang uses he/him pronouns and expresses his gender as subtle masc. He is bilingual in English and Chinese, works in mental health counseling, and has a large social circle. Ping has an outgoing personality and spends a lot of time cooking and dining with friends and family.