Usability and user experience
DJ and Bonny started a conversation off the back of The user experience of brands. It throws up the need to explore the difference between usability and user experience and in my opinion why they are both important.
As DJ mentions, clients within the same vertical can suffer from the same usability issues. We are fortunate to have worked with several companies within the same verticals and so have some thoughts around what the differences are.
My definition is this…
Actually let’s use the ISO definition for how usability can be measured as a starting point. ISO 9421 says that the usability of something should be measured in terms of its effectiveness, efficiency and satisfaction.
Effectiveness is about whether or not people can complete the tasks they’re attempting.
Efficiency is how quickly they can do it (tends to be less important in web and non-mission critical applications).
Satisfaction is a measure of how well people enjoy doing something (possibly the most interesting as a high user satisfaction has an effect on the users perception of effectiveness and efficiency).
So what’s user experience?
User experience is about the bigger relationship between the customer and a brand. So not so much whether something is usable or not, but how easy it is to understand, engage and have a dialogue with a brand.
That’s huge! It requires a need for everyone from board level to those on the shop floor (including designers, developers, copywriters and managers) to be thinking the same way and doing the same things.
You don’t need eyes you need vision
And that’s the crux of it. Without a singular vision of the user experience you want to create it’s very hard to achieve a great user experience.
Think of some great brands – Apple, Innocent Drinks, Nike, Howies (ok it’s getting personal now). Whoever you talk to within these brand shares the vision for who the company is and what it stands for.
What’s that got to do with my website / mobile app / newsletter / application?
Try thinking of these things as a colleague rather than an object.
As a colleague what would you want them to say about the brand, how would you want them to engage with your customers.
Certainly with websites they have in some respects become the voice of the brand. So how do they look, what do they say, how do they respond to complaints?
All these things are important in the realms of creating a great user experience. Making these things usable should be mandatory.
Thinking back to brands within the same verticals, it becomes easier to see how they can have the same desire to be usable while chasing after a different user experience.
Getting back to the vision
As a user experience consultancy cxpartners get to help people develop vision.
We haven’t set out only to make sites more usable and accessible, though these are important, we want our clients to understand how to talk and engage with their customers better.
How do we do this? We talk and engage with our clients customers and enable a conversation between them.
Talk to me
Do these ramblings make sense? I’d love to hear your thoughts.
About the author
Richard is a managing director at cxpartners. He works with brands to develop engaging user experiences for different devices, and loves creative problem solving. Richard does a lot of baking, and loves to make bread. Email Richard, or call +44 (0)117 946 3930
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Just to be challenging for a minute (because of course fundamentally I agree with you!)
I was recently in a pretty large room of online marketing & e-commerce professionals. They were being asked by the speaker (a very highly qualified usability / UX person from the States) to what extent they were doing user experience.
User testing? Quite a few hands went up.
Heard of Jakob Nielsen, read his articles? Still quite a few hands up.
Know what ‘heuristics’ are? A lot of hands went down…
Understand the process of designing for users, ISO standards, define user’s context and requirements, employ research techniques etc? I think it may have only been me with my hand up at this point…
Talking after the conference with some of the Stateside guys they said that this is not surprising at all, and that even in the US, there is still not much focus on even usability let alone user experience from the business and marketing side. Imagine if the topic were offline advertising, I doubt marketing types would admit to not knowing about some of the fundamentals required there.
It also quite rare in my experience, unless you’re dealing with a particularly structured and rigorous organisation, that there is a defined-and-signed-off, marketing-&-business-agreed “vision”. There are always slight differences and takes and agendas and spins to be had due to the nature of organisations, and the inevitable politics therein.
Both of these issues lead me to my point: in order to get beyond traditionally understood notions of “usability” (or to avoid it altogether!) and get into “user experience” you need:
- a huge amount of momentum behind the concept at the top level (or someone like Mr Jobs calling the shots…)
- savvy people to articulate and structure activities around the vision (usually people who have done this sort of stuff before)
- an amazing intuitive ability to prioritise, and fast
Perhaps this is too big a sell for a pretty large majority of clients?
Perhaps we should simply get them to watch some user testing? (First test comes free, then we’ll start consulting and helping you put things right…)
Just my 0.02ukp
Cheers
DJ
As one more Senior UX Architect, I will try to explain this more easily.
As a UX architect / Information Architect, I will tell you that there has been a complete misunderstanding about what we actually do.
User Experience is just that, a focus on the overall experience of the user. Many Information Architects (i.e. Webmasters, System Operators, Admins who created websites during the last few decades) put blinders on and took NO consideration of how users-interacted with what was created.
Usability came across from user-research (user-feedback, user-surveys, etc.) as a guide in how people interacted with products, websites, applications, etc. that we architect/designers created (i.e. The ability of an individual to “use” something, etc.)
Usability is how we focus on creating a user-interface, application, website perform better, function better, and hopefully achieve a better overall experience for the end user (user-experience).
I see arguments from graphics designers and techies who don’t even understand what us information architects / User-Experience Architects actually did/do. So please stop listening to people saying there is a distinct difference. To seperate usability out of user-experience is to seperate the brain from the human conciousness.
In essence I have to ubfortunately disagree with this article. brand awareness, brand Loyalty, customer retention should not be misconstrued with user-experience. A bad or good user experience will impact these of course, but it is not the same as user-experience and usability in the context of this situation.
We just created this title to further refine what we should be focusing on… *user-experience* versus architecting information without finding out how people were able to use the product *usability* we created in the past few years.
Thanks, DJ, Mark – both great comments.
I agree that getting people to watch some user testing is probably the most important thing we do. It’s about connecting with customers and their problems. Analytics are essential, but having a human connection to customers is motivating and compelling in a way that numbers just can’t match. It changes the way people think about websites.
As for titles and disciplines, that’s a little harder. Usability has a disciplinary focus on tasks and goals. But user experience is something bigger and I do agree with Rich that how you feel about a brand affects how you interpret the experience you get on their website.
When the online Apple Store goes down it’s a cue for excitement and speculation online. When National Rail Enquiries goes down it’s a cue for anger and vitriol.
Often, we start small with our clients: user testing, looking for problems we can fix today. But these often lead us to issues that are at the heart of their business processes, history and future direction. To fix the user experience, we need to take it slowly and keep an eye on the big picture.
I came across a nice quote (which goes to your point, Mark, about the relationship between usability and user experience):
‘Always design a thing by considering it in its next larger context – a chair in a room, a room in a house, a house in an environment, an environment in a city plan.’ – Eero Saarinen
No matter what level we’re operating at, we need to be able to place our work in the next larger context.