Usability and the user experience
Posted March 9th, 2009 by David HamillWhat’s the difference between usability and user experience? For me, user experience is the experience someone has when using a design. Usability is the extent to which the design provides a good user experience. Usability is often misunderstood to mean ‘ease of use’. It’s much more than this though.
User experience design
I was reading an article by Whitney Hess in which she was explaining user experience design. It’s a very good article, I recommend you give it a read.
However there is a section of it I disagree with. Hess explains that one of the misconceptions of user experience (UX) design is that it’s just about usability. I don’t think that’s a misconception of UX design, I think it’s a misconception of usability.
I believe Hess is trying to say that user experience design is not just about getting people from A to B as quickly as possible. If so, I agree.
Usability is not just ease of use
Getting from A to B quickly is an important part of understanding how usable a website is, but there’s more to it than that. As well as efficiency, usability is defined by how effectively the website fulfils its purpose and the satisfaction people have when using it.
Satisfaction gained from use
Let’s take my phone as an example. I have a Sony Xperia X1. The phone has a lot of good usability features (It uses Windows Mobile so there’s also a lot of issues there too).
The phone uses a standard USB input for charging. If I’m at work or in a client’s office and my phone is running out of charge, I can just find a USB cable and recharge it from my computer. This is more efficient and effective than many other phones, so I’m pretty satisfied with this part of it.
The design of the phone is minimalist and it has a brushed metal casing. It looks pretty cool. I use the QWERTY keyboard on it a lot. The way the keyboard slides out is very slick. So I’m even more satisfied with my use of the phone.
It works well, it’s slick and looks cool. All of these things are contributing factors to my level of satisfaction.
Satisfaction that’s gained from the user’s experience of a product is part of that product’s usability.
Learnability, credibility, desirability etc
Some people argue that usability doesn’t take account of things like learnability and desirability, whilst user experience does. Usability does actually take account of these things. This is where effectiveness and context of use come in.
You see, things like desirability and credibility are influences on the overall effectiveness. The context of use dictates how suitable such considerations are when looking at the usability of the design.
For example the credibility of a site that provides health advice will have a massive influence on its overall effectiveness. You might be able to find the information you want quickly. But if you don’t trust the source as being credible then the website is not effective for its purpose. This is bad usability.
Learnability is an appropriate consideration for a website I’m going to use repeatedly, or spend a long time using. But a site that I visit once and never need to return to, can’t rely on me to learn it. The extent to which learnability can influence a website’s effectiveness is dependent on the context of use.
Excusing bad prioritisation
One problem I have with the term ‘user experience’ is that people often use it as an excuse to prioritise the wrong things.
So when a severe usability problem has a potentially ugly remedy, the issue often remains unresolved in the name of the “preserving the user experience”.
Defenders of the shoddy interface will say to me “the user experience is about more than just the design’s usability”. Funnily enough, this is often the same designers who didn’t come to watch their design being tested.
Get the basics right first
When considering the usability of websites, efficiency and effectiveness have a massive impact on user satisfaction. So usability issues that impede these things should often be prioritised over slick transitions and aesthetics.
Make sure the basic tasks are adequately easy to complete and then you can impress your user by making it both inutitive and desirable.
We care about the user experience
You may choose to just think of usability as ease of use and if so good luck to you. In which case, you’d be justified in saying that user experience is about more than usability. Because you’ve chosen to use a very narrow view of usability.
Just be aware that usability professionals aren’t all stop-watch wielding scientist types, who look at your website as though efficiency is the only thing that matters. We care just as much about the user experience as you do.
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20 Responses to “Usability and the user experience”
March 9th, 2009 at 11:34 am
Great article, I definately agree with you.
In my own experience of using my Sony mp3 player, I didn’t find it the most intuitive interface to use and although I’ve had it for a few years now, I never really learned how to use all the features. There are probably a number of reasons for that – my listening needs only went as far as wanting to find albums to listen to from start to finish. I had no desire to create a playlist etc. The important thing here was that I thought the device was cool looking, slick with nice design features so was willing to overlook some of the interface faults.
When you are thinking about usability and user experience you have to consider all these aspects. Although Sony could and should have improved its interface, my overall expereince using the device was still good because they had thought about other aspects of the design.
I hope I’ve understood the point you were making. It would be interesting if you or anyone else reading had a example of a situation where clients have used bad prioritisation?
March 9th, 2009 at 11:50 am
If you haven’t seen it already this is a great video where Don Norman talks about user experience vs. usability
http://vimeo.com/2963837
I like how he says that user experience is just about opening the package the product ships in as it is about locating function X in the menu. It is a holistic view rather than a low-level ‘can someone do this or not’, which we often aim to measure in order to assess the level of usability.
In the talk they also refer to an interesting point about dropping the word ‘user’ altogether because depending on the project you are designing the patient’s experience, the driver’s experience and so on. Focusing on the ‘user’ is somewhat limiting in my view, placing most of the emphasis on ease of use in order to answer the question ‘can someone use this?’ rather than consider ‘WOULD someone use this?’
March 9th, 2009 at 12:29 pm
Wonderful article, David, and better than most to help clear things up.
For those of us in this field, we know ‘user experience’ is a much newer expression than the term ‘usability.’ The question we might ask is why did it come about? What was the need for it that ‘usability’ alone could not provide?
I think the answer largely, though not solely, lies in the post development phases of a line of products; when packaging, marketing, sales, etc come into play. It’s not the usability engineers job to worry about these things, but they indeed contribute to the user’s overall satisfaction and thus user experience. This is what the user-focused models have been accounting for in recent years.
Think about how many times we’ve heard someone say how hard it is to open a CD gel after buying it from the music store. That’s bad user experience targeted at packaging.
On the flip-side, consider the consistent presentation and branding (e.g., logo types) for product suites (e.g., Adobe suites). Most would probably say this contributes to successful user experience of these products. They are easily identified before purchase and after when the icons are sitting in the user’s desktop.
With this idea of user experience, it’s easier to see the apples from the oranges; it’s easier to recognize user experience as an umbrella term suggesting a more holistic state, not a given activity or role. This is why the label “user experience designer” is erroneous, in my opinion, and very misleading. The closest thing might be “Director of User Experience” who coordinates the efforts of the user analysts, information architects, interface designers, marketing writers, and what have you, but few companies are organized this well. More realistically the marketing and IT departments are still pissing over who owns the web site.
You’re article does a great job at looking at the user analysis activity within the UX model, and it is the most important component of the model. Everything begins (and ends) with knowing the user
March 9th, 2009 at 1:01 pm
Spot on. There’s a big misconception that usability simply means “Easy to Use”. This notion is reinforced by people who should know better — including the UPA whose slogan for World Usability Day last year was “Making life easy”. If people checked the ISO standard you reference they would see the multi-dimensional nature of usability encompasses user experience.
March 9th, 2009 at 1:48 pm
Great article! I guess a lot of problems people in our profession have is explaining what we do to others. It is something I still feel people don’t really understand – they have some idea of what we do but they don’t really comprehend what we do or how we do this. Personally I find people understand the notion of making something easier to use, but trying to explain much beyond this is difficult for the receiver to fully comprehend. Perhaps the UPA is trying to reach a wider audience by focussing on the ‘Make life easy’ slogan. If it creates more interest and understanding for our field then I believe this is a good thing.
However, there is also a negative aspect to increased awareness. I have noticed a lot of new usability consultancies in recent years and some of these are obviously not properly trained usability people but people who have done a 10 day course or read a few books. Personally, I would like to see some kind of CPD implemented to gain official accreditation within usability to sort out the cowboys from those of us who have spent years of our lives dedicated to the cause.
March 11th, 2009 at 2:50 am
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March 12th, 2009 at 1:22 am
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March 16th, 2009 at 12:56 am
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March 19th, 2009 at 2:56 pm
David, thanks so much for linking to my article and for giving your perspective on usability. I absolutely agree.
March 19th, 2009 at 4:11 pm
Hi Whitney, no problem I enjoyed your article and I’m glad that I understood you correctly.
April 2nd, 2009 at 1:33 pm
[...] Usability and the user experience [...]
April 14th, 2009 at 10:36 am
Great article!
Thanks David.
April 17th, 2009 at 2:41 pm
Hi Dave,
Great post, but I wanted to give my tuppence worth…
As I see it, usability is about the tool, or product, and how it meets the understood criteria of usability. It’s about assessing the tool itself, and it stems from ergonomics. That’s my reading of the ISO standard too. The original title of the ISO standard is quite helpful in this regard: “Ergonomic requirements for office work with visual display terminals (VDTs)”
User experience encompasses the other aspects of the use of the tool or product, but outside the product itself. Jared Spool has a good example from a couple of years ago that I think illustrates the differences: http://tinyurl.com/2xb8fk
Also, the excerpt on your website actually illustrates why people see (rightly or wrongly) usability as focused on evaluative rather than generative understanding – that’s how the ISO define it. It’s about assessing a product in relation to a human’s ability to use it.
So I don’t see how exploratory contextual research to understand the problems faced by a group of people, which is then used to design original solutions for them, fit into this ISO definition.
On the other hand this is easily understood by most as part of UX.
I don’t dispute that the best people and companies who have traditionally called themselves “usability” specialists have been doing all of the above – they have – but I would argue that the ISO definition itself limits usability to evaluation of human computer interfaces and nothing more.
In many ways I don’t think this issue is of vital importance, but I think it’s a good debate to have.
April 17th, 2009 at 2:55 pm
Hi Lee,
Bizarrely I hadn’t seen that Jared Spool post. I think we’re getting into granular detail here. To the extent that it isn’t helpful.
My argument would be that this is all just usability. It just depends on what you’re looking at. You can research the usability of a camera, the process of buying it, the act of researching your purchase decision, the menu system of the phone line when you complain that it doesn’t work. The list is endless.
The reason I prefer using the term ‘usability’ is that user experience is a little too vague and fluffy. It is also borrowed far too often by people who really mean ‘snazzy’.
April 21st, 2009 at 10:02 pm
Good discussion.
When we use terms like “usability” and “user experience”, we’re trying to use a shorthand to communicate concepts that are important to us.
The success of that communication will depend on whether both the transmitter and the receiver (the two components of any communication) share a common understanding of the shorthand terms. If they do, the communication will be clear.
However, if they don’t, the communication will become muddled and, worse, the disconnect in meaning may go unnoticed until a later point, where reconciling the differences may be more costly.
So, while we can each have our own definitions of terms, such as “usability”, unless we define our use with each instance, we can’t be sure our definition is the same as the person we’re communicating with. This becomes a problem when we adopt a different interpretation (such as “usability is broader than ease of use”) than the majority of people we’re talking to.
People have been banging the “usability is broader than ease-of-use” drum for a really long time (greater than 10 years). However, it hasn’t caught on yet. Maybe someday.
Introducing a new term, such as user experience, can be helpful in some instances. It’s because its use, being foreign, demands definition. So, that’s why you see new terms supplanting old ones (Interaction Designer vs. UI Designer; Information Architect vs. Webmaster).
The vague and fluffy qualities of User Experience is why it makes the term so useful. Being vague and fluffy means it’s malleable.
So, if you wish to keep pushing usability to have the broader definition, then I think you’ll be taking on the burden of appending, “And by ‘usability’, I mean…” for quite a while.
Jared
April 22nd, 2009 at 9:20 am
Hi Jared, thanks for the detailed comment. Pretty soon I think that User Experience/Usability people will be searching for a new label. Or even returning back to Usability. In recent years, User Experience is used more and more to describe things that just look nice. People who were once called ‘web designers’ are noticing this ‘user experience designer’ role and deciding that this is what they are. But they’re often using the same practices that don’t involve users.
Looking around the web, I see websites and blogs profiling examples of good user experience that are just nice designs. I also meet people who introduce themselves as a user experience somethingorother only to find that they have never put a design within a 100 yards of its target user before launching it.
I realise that I’m going to continue to append “and by usability I mean” every time I want to say that it’s more than ease of use. But I guess I think it’s better than explaining that user experience is more than being snazzy.
April 24th, 2009 at 2:00 am
From my perspective, UX gives you the chance to talk about the entire, holistic experience that the user is dealing with. When our clients talk about it, they get it very quickly.
When we focus just on usability, they start to bring up all these other concepts, such as aesthetics, business models, offline integration, and persuasion. Yet, when we talk about user experience, they seem to ‘get’ that all these things are part of the solution.
So, we’ll be sticking with user experience for now.
Jared
February 5th, 2010 at 2:30 pm
[...] Usability and the user experience [...]
May 25th, 2010 at 2:57 am
I have to disagree here with this article. As a UX Architect, we redefined the role of information architect with UX (user-experience) architect to take into account user-research, user-feedback hence the new evolution of IA, versus Web Master, versus System Operator of old.
User experience is just that, it is the overall encompasses aspect of the user’s experience with website, application or product.
Usability is the metrics, the quantitative metrics and the fundamental aspects of the basic interactions of any given product.
I see a lot of this esoteric obfuscation of the nomenclature by people who are new, who want to throw their two cents worth into overcomplicating what we architects actually do.
Usually I see these debates by theory versus practical application (real world) types.
Don’t overcomplicate this with new definitions to what we already do. it’s simple. If a person cannot use (usability( a product, he’s going to have a bad experience (user-experience). We created UX architect terminology to seperate us from Information Architects who took no account from user-research, user-feedback, user metrics, but architected their way into a corner with their blinders.
This article overcomplicates the simplistic.
May 25th, 2010 at 6:02 am
Hi Mark, thanks for the comment. I’m not making up my own definitoin here and that’s kinda my point. It’s an ISO definition that I happen to agree with. As for over compliating it? I guess I’m biased but I recckon my argument is a bit easier to understand than yours, esoteric obfuscation of the nomenclature or not.
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