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.

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

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.

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

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’.

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.

Thanks David.