userTriggered

Usertriggered is a descriptive term used in software engineering to refer to actions and events that originate from a user’s input, as opposed to actions triggered automatically by a system or by automated processes. The term is not a formal standard but is widely used in documentation, design notes, and code comments to indicate human-originated events. In code, the concept is often expressed in naming as userTriggered, or, with hyphenation, user-triggered.

Typical user-triggered events include button clicks, menu selections, keystrokes, touch gestures, and voice commands. In web applications these are commonly handled by event listeners attached to UI elements. In mobile and desktop apps, similar handlers respond to taps, swipes, or keyboard input. Distinguishing user-triggered from system-triggered helps with debugging, accessibility, and analytics.

The distinction is also relevant for event processing semantics. In some environments, events carry an origin flag (for example, isTrusted in DOM events) that can indicate whether an event was user-initiated or synthetic. Programmatic triggers—where code invokes a function that simulates a user action—may or may not be considered truly user-triggered, depending on the framework.

Usage and interpretation of the term vary by project. Some teams use it to gate behavior, such as confirming irreversible actions only when user-triggered; others annotate telemetry to separate user-driven usage from automated workflows.