When we meet new clients and begin discussing the goals of the software project, there’s often a bit of education that has to take place. A frequent mistake that I see is when people confuse usability and user experience. It’s an easy mistake, but there are important distinctions that effect the design.
From their book “Interaction Design”, Preece, Rogers, and Sharp define Usability as being a multifaceted concept. Usability goals can be memorability, learnability, efficiency, safety, utility, or a combination of those. Some of those goals might even conflict somewhat. Some of the old command prompt interfaces are extremely efficient and very usable for expert users, but are almost totally unusable by new users who need the application to be more learnable.
They go on to define a separate set of experience goals that include satisfying, enjoyable, fun, entertaining, helpful, motivating, aesthetically pleasing, and supportive of creativity. These are a little bit more difficult to measure; they are subjective in nature. These describe how the user connects with the product at an emotional level.
How about the example of Mr. Usability himself Jakob Nielsen’s website? I know that he’s an easy target, but it takes only one look at his site useit.com to clearly understand that it is very usable, but the experience totally sucks. People CAN use it, but few WANT to. There is little difference between Nielsen’s site and the very first public HTML sites. Even though user expectations and desires have evolved, his site hasn’t.
So usability is not user experience. It is as important, maybe even more important than experience, but if you ignore the experience and focus solely on usability you might end up with something that nobody WANTS to use. At the first opportunity of a real alternative with a good experience, people will abandon the usable but unsatisfying, laborious, boring, unhelpful, demotivating, ugly, and/or non-creative experience for the better one.
Elements that create solid usability are easier to imitate without screaming rip to most people. A lot of usability is predicated on existing patterns. It’s user experience that needs more attention in order to differentiate your product.
Update: another example of a bad, yet usable experience coming out of the Usability field: Usability Professional Organization. Do usability experts hate visual design? They must!
Debbie Stocker
March 25, 2010 at 3:28 pm
Love this article and your distinction between usability and user experience. I've begun noticing a real disconnect between great visual design and the design trends that are emerging and showcased in places such as Smashing Magazine and the designs that are produced in the usability field. It seems to make sense to me that there must be some way of uniting the two but they seem so disjointed at present. Your clarification of usability and user experience really hits the nail on the head!
Also, to add some more food for thought. Tractinsky, Katz & Ikar conducted some research back in 2000 with ATM machines and came to the conclusion that “What is beautiful is usable” (the title of their paper). They found that after use, users perceived an attractive interface to be both more aesthetically pleasing and more usable, whereas the degree of actual usability had no such effect. In the same way, Donald Norman, in his book 'Emotional Design', wrote about the idea that attractive things work better, because we are more engaged with them and we feel happier about using them. Obviously, we can all think of exceptions to the rule, both for attractive items that are impossible to use and ugly things that make life really easy, but it's definitely an idea to bear in mind.
For me, I see no reason why usability and user experience cannot go hand in hand, in many cases creating a win-win situation for both, where user experience in fact adds to usability, making a more pleasurable, usable experience all round.