I have read tons of case studies and one thing I noticed is how they refer to the people they are designing products for. They use the words 'users' and 'customer' interchangeably. I assumed they meant the same thing so when I'm writing my case studies, I started using either of them.

It was until I watched a video by Harvard Innovation Labs (I can't remember which one). The speaker mentioned something about customers and users like they were different. I did some research and learnt they aren't. Let me explain.

Who are Users? As a product designer, users interact with the product you are designing. I'm a user of Spotify, I listen to music and use all the functionalities available on the app.

Who are Customers? These are people that pay for the product or services. If I'm making use of a paid Spotify plan and my partner is paying for it then he is the customer because he has a financial relationship with Spotify; he is their customer.

There are different permutations for these roles and I listed a few down with examples,

When a User is also a Customer

A user can also be a customer at the same time. If I decide to switch to an Individual Spotify plan, I am now a user and a customer. Creating an account and subscribing to a Netflix plan makes me a user and a customer.

When a User is not a Customer

When I use Slack to communicate with my team at work, I am a user but I am not a customer because I'm not the one paying for the service my company is. A person making use of a Freemium plan is a user, when they upgrade to a paid plan they become customers.

When a Customer is not a User

When a company is paying for a premium Figma plan for their designers, they are customers but because they aren't using Figma themselves. Outside of technology, you can consider the parent-child relationship as an example of when a Customer is not a user. A mother buying toys for her children makes her the customer because she is the one that has purchasing power, her kids are the users.

How does this affect what we do as designers?

From my experience, I believe every company's goal is to convert users to paying customers. That's in cases where that scenario is applicable like e-commerce (consumer software). So as designers, we are making the checkout flow easy to encourage users to buy. We are informing them of the best deals on the landing page and making the '50% off' bold and big so that they won't miss it.

In Product strategy, We determine what features users have access to because they are making use of a freemium plan and what they can have access to when they upgrade to a premium plan and become customers. For example, Notion's Free plan allows their users to invite only 10 guests and the paid plans allow users to invite more guests.

Are there other ways that the User vs Customer distinction can influence what we build as designers? I am curious to know, please share in the comments.