In Brazil, I get into the store and then I make a left. In the US, people tell me it will be east inside the store. I have never gotten used to that. It feels like being handed directions in a language I only half speak.
Then I heard a scientist describe people in Australia who say “there is a fly northeast of your knee” or “pass me the salt that is southwest of your fork.” No left, no right. Directions are absolute, and the words keep them oriented to the world at all times.
That is a different way of paying attention.
The sentence I paused the video for
I have spoken more than one language for most of my life, and I have programmed in more than one. Depending on which language I am thinking in, listening to, writing, or speaking, I think differently. I had that realization years ago, before I ever ran into anyone explaining it.
Then I found videos from scientists who study it. While watching one of them, I kept pausing to write things down. One of the things was this: change the way people talk, change the way they think.
Once I heard it, I saw it everywhere in my work.
In order to, I want to
I have written and talked about story formats for years. My preference is to start with “in order to” instead of “as a user.”
In order to what? That is the need. The why. When people talk that way, they think about the outcome first. They have to name the behavior change they are after before they name the thing they want.
I wrote about a sprint planning where a teammate read a story that sounded finished: in order to quickly navigate through sales orders, as a salesperson, I want to see a list of all existing sales orders. Everyone nodded. The story jumps over the need and lands on a solution, and the solution happens to be a grid. That is in From User Stories to Working Software, and the problem shows up in reverse in When User Stories Describe Solutions Instead of Problems, where the story described a viewport change and the first question was “how is this valuable?”
“As a user” frames a person as someone using something. That is rarely what they are. A business card does not say Joe Simmons, user. It says CEO, or seller, or solution architect. Even when that solution architect is using something, the using is not the important part. The important part is the role they are playing at that moment and the workflow they are in the middle of. That context is the real constraint on what they need.
In Designing for Humans, Not Just Users I put it another way: users are not living in our apps all day. They are juggling customers, distractions, noise, and deadlines. The word on the card is a better description of who is actually there than the word “user” is.
I see the same thing in Given/When/Then. “Given the user, when the user, then the user” puts distance between the person and us. “Given I, when I, then I” asks us to think through their perspective. The closer we get to it, the better chance we have of helping them.
I wrote that one up in From ‘The User’ to ‘I’. The story says “as a buyer,” first person, and then the scenario flips to “the user,” third person, and the person ends up over there, separate from us. When I write “the user does this,” I am narrating. When I write “I do this,” I am experiencing it, and I start asking different questions: does this flow make sense to me, would I be frustrated by this extra step. That is the whole idea in miniature. A pronoun changed the position I was standing in.
This is the part of Why I Prefer Given-When-Then Over Arrange-Act-Assert that matters more than the syntax. Both patterns work. The one you pick changes how you think about the test (or spec).
A hammer is not a need
Putting “in order to” first does one more thing. It separates the need from the want.
Somebody tells you they want a hammer. Do they? What for? Because they need to build a house. What for? Because they need a place to live.
The need is not a hammer. It isn’t even a house. It is housing—a place to live. Shifting from the object to the outcome reveals choices that were invisible before: build, buy, rent, or relocate. Changing the word expands the solution space.
Define the Need, Solve the Problem makes the case for that separation, and Before You Solve Problems, Understand Needs adds the layer above it: values, then aspirations, then needs, then problems, then solutions. The story format is where that thinking becomes something a room full of people can see.
Infrastructure is a hammer
Arnold Schwarzenegger ran into the same problem at a much larger scale. In Total Recall, writing about his 2006 Strategic Growth Plan, he describes asking the legislature to put $68 billion in bonds before the voters. He did not lead with bonds. He talked to people about sitting in traffic and missing soccer games or dinner with the family. He talked to them about the crowded, temporary classrooms their kids went to school in.
He came back to it in Be Useful, in the chapter on communication, and said it plainly: voters do not care about infrastructure by themselves. What he talked about was fixing the roads so moms and dads did not have to sit in traffic so long and miss their kids’ soccer practices so often.
Infrastructure and bonds are the hammer. Being home in time for dinner and making your kid’s soccer game is the housing. The highway lanes and the overpasses are the house, the concrete middle that people can actually picture. But the thing that moved them was the evening they were not going to lose.
He changed the words, and the words changed what people thought they were voting for.
Experience comes before interface
People say UI/UX. User interface, user experience. The experience should come first.
What is the experience we are trying to give someone? When we give it to them, what stories will they tell about it? Then, and only then: how do we want them interacting with the product or service?
We think faster than we talk. To be understood, we have to slow down and put our thoughts in order. If we order them deliberately, we change how we think and how the people listening to us think. Talking is the slow version of thinking, which is why it is where thinking gets steered.
So human experience, then human interface. I made that argument at length in Why UX Is a Developer’s Job, Not a Designer’s Afterthought: UX is not a coat of paint, it is whether the thing is useful. Swapping the word is small. What it does to where people look is not.
Nobody says “let me tell you a requirement”
People say “let me tell you a story.” When we call them requirements, we think about them as a checklist instead of as someone’s situation.
The story is the whole thing. Requirements live inside it, as the rules we follow to tell it well. The rule book is a reference for part of the story. It is not the story. I have made that argument before in Stories, Not Requirements, and again in Stories Long Before AI, where the format went up on a whiteboard with people who do not write code, long before any of this involved a prompt.
Date formats are the same question. Year, month, day, or day, month, year? If I am sorting through things that happened, the year should come first, then the month, then the day. If I am living my life, the day is what changes every day, so maybe the day should come first. That is why month first is hard for me. The month barely moves.
The time part has its own version of this. At that level of granularity, it does not make sense to say the millisecond, or even the second, unless what I am saying actually depends on it. A rocket launch counts down to the second, so the seconds come first and they count backward. A meeting at 3 is a meeting at 3, and nobody needs to know about the milliseconds.
It comes down to what I am optimizing for. If all I am doing is naming a meeting, the hour is enough. If I am timing a race, the seconds and milliseconds matter. What I am focusing on is what I should be saying.
The words set the focus.
A name is a way of seeing
When I was looking for an alternative to Evernote, I looked at Notion, which uses “databases” heavily; a term most commonly used by software developers. I did not like that. Database puts the focus on storage, on rows and columns. Obsidian calls its space a Vault, which puts the focus somewhere else entirely. I liked it better.
I have more to say about that one later. The point for now: a name is not neutral. It tells people where to look; how to think about it.
Vibe Coding Is Just Bad Naming went further in that direction. We call it loading when people want showing. We teach people to say delete when they mean cancel or archive. A name does not just describe the thing. It sets what the next conversation is about.
I keep making the same case in posts and in talks. Pick the words carefully: the need before the want, the experience before the interface, the story before the requirement. That is the design of how people will think about what we solve together.
I do not always get the order right the first time. The habit is noticing the words I am already using, and asking what they are making me pay attention to.
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