Norman, now 88, explained to me that the term “user” proliferated in part because early computer technologists mistakenly assumed that people were kind of like machines. “The user was simply another component,” he said. “We didn’t think of them as a person—we thought of [them] as part of a system.” So early user experience design didn’t seek to make human-computer interactions “user friendly,” per se. The objective was to encourage people to complete tasks quickly and efficiently. People and their computers were just two parts of the larger systems being built by tech companies, which operated by their own rules and in pursuit of their own agendas.
“User” as a component of the bigger system
Thinking about this and any contrast between “user experience design” and “human computer interaction”. And about schema.org constructs embedded in web pages…creating web pages that were meant to be read by both humans and bots.