User
A user is the entity that wants something and is trying to get to it. The thing that makes someone a user is the destination they showed up pursuing, not the fact that they happen to be poking around inside the app. Usually that entity is a person, but it can just as well be a team or an organization with something of its own it's trying to reach.
Definition
A user is the directedness-having entity in a user-provider transition — the entity pursuing a sought state through their own energy, attention, and activity.
Directedness is the criterion
A user has purposive directedness, made up of three components:
- Energy: what the user brings (metabolic, attentional, motivational); the offering doesn't generate it.
- Sought state: what the energy is directed toward.
- Regulatory mechanism: continuous tracking of whether engagement is producing progress, with adjustments made on that basis.
Energy without a sought state is undirected; a sought state without energy is inert; both without regulation produce no correction when the path stops working. The three are distinct and all required.
Because the user has directedness, the offering supports a pursuit that's already underway.
The user's own timeline
A user shows up at a moment that's already mid-life. They arrive in a now-state of their own, with conditions that hold for reasons that predate the offering, and attention divided across whatever else they're doing. Their pursuit existed before the offering's involvement and continues after it; the offering is one path among many they could integrate into a transition they were going to attempt regardless.
The user timeline sits in opposition to the provider-biased timeline — funding rounds, feature releases, internal roadmaps. Users don't know or care about that timeline. Designing against it points the offering at a target the user isn't on.
Who counts as a user
Most often, the user is a human person — the typical case is self-serve SaaS, where individual humans drive the decisions. But the criterion is directedness, not humanity. A team coordinating a launch, a department selecting tooling, an organization pursuing a regulatory state — all can meet the criterion. Keeping the term loose forces the framing question to be "what is this user pursuing?" rather than "what role label does this user carry?"
Example
A project management SaaS measures "weekly active users" by login frequency. The metric counts three groups indiscriminately: team leads using the tool to coordinate cross-functional work (directedness-having, with a sought state the offering can support), evaluators clicking through screens to decide whether to buy (directedness-having, with a different sought state), and people who clicked an ad and tabbed away (no active pursuit underway). Only the first two are users in the strict sense; the third has no pursuit for the offering to support.