For the last time: Customer and user are not the same. They are frequently not even the same person. And yet, day after day, I have conversations where these two are lobbed around interchangeably, as if it wouldn't matter, as buying icecream is essentially the same as eating it.
In B2C, yes, sometimes the person buying the app is the person using the app. But even then, not always. Who buys the children's learning software? The parent. Who uses it? The child. These two people have entirely different needs, motivations, and pain points. Design for the wrong one, and you've failed both.
OK, there are jobs to be done for customer and user as well, that your product needs to anwer to, but that still doesn't mean, that the jobs and needs overlap! It does matter way lee
And don't even get me started on B2B. Because there you've got a procurement manager who evaluates the contract, a budget holder who signs it off, an IT department that has opinions about everything, a team lead who championed the tool internally, and then — somewhere at the bottom of this food chain — the actual human being who has to open the thing every single morning and get their job done with it. Each of these people needs something different from your product. Each of them can sink it. So which one are you designing for? All of them? None of them? Btter be clear about who you're addressing with your new feature.
When you say "the user", mean it. When you mean the customer, say customer. When you mean the decision-maker, say decision-maker. Sloppy language produces sloppy thinking, and sloppy thinking produces products that serve no one particularly well.
This distinction is not pedantry. It is the foundation of everything we do. And if you have trouble getting this straight, then I'm happy to help apply the Jobs to be Done framework to your product. It makes such distinctions incredibly easy.
Sorry, for ranting again. Now, I can let it go. And you can read the first rant because UX is not UI!.