The Difference Between Usability and User Experience

By Marisa Peacock (@marisacp51) Mar 16, 2010

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As long as there’s been an Internet, the discussion between user experience and usability has been explored. Although they are conceptually linked, taken separately, they highlight different elements of the human-computer interaction.

Yet in these days of advanced user interfaces, from mobile devices to e-readers to tablets, has the line between user experience and usability blurred? And if so, what does it mean for web standards and design? We examine their distinctions, roles and implications in an effort to answer these questions.

The Road

Throughout the early days of the Internet, the analogy of a road was widely used to describe usability and user experience. The story goes, a usable road is one that is wide and straight, and enables drivers to get from point A to point B as fast as possible, albeit in a very boring manner.

However, a road with a high level of user-experience is completely different. With great scenery and smells that stimulate driver emotion, the road may take twists and turns, but is not as direct as the usable road.

As the Internet has grown, so have the roads built by designers and developers. There many more interstates and back roads, not to mention an increase in vehicles, pedestrians and traffic signals.

The road analogy is no longer sufficient to define user experience and usability.

What Comes First?

Surely these concepts exist separately from one another: a site that is purely functional (i.e, Craigslist); or a site that is pretty but hard to navigate (Sputnik Observatory), but when using both, which comes first in the design process is not always clear.

The Nielsen Norman Group says that:

"User experience" encompasses all aspects of the end-user's interaction with the company, its services, and its products. The first requirement for an exemplary user experience is to meet the exact needs of the customer, without fuss or bother. Next comes simplicity and elegance that produce products that are a joy to own, a joy to use. True user experience goes far beyond giving customers what they say they want, or providing checklist features. In order to achieve high-quality user experience in a company's offerings there must be a seamless merging of the services of multiple disciplines, including engineering, marketing, graphical and industrial design, and interface design.

Jakob Nielsen defines usability as:

a quality attribute that assesses how easy user interfaces are to use.

He also outlines five quality components of usability, including:

Learnability
Efficiency
Memorability
Errors
Satisfaction

Using these definitions as a guide, it seems that in order to create a user experience, you must first understand what the user’s needs are, which can be measured using the five qualities outlined above. The user experience is only necessary once a website performs a function relevant to the user. If the user’s needs are met, the user experience can enhance the online process.

Yet, the user experience doesn’t always enhance a necessary or desired online interaction. Consider the mobile experience. In 2009, Jakob Nielsen called it “miserable,” citing that it is “neither easy nor pleasant to use the Web on mobile devices.” Research shows that when websites are designed specifically for mobile devices, they are easier to use. In this case, going from point A to point B requires that the user experience come before usability.

Designing Usability and User Experiences for Devices

What about when a device is not just a website, but a series of interactions and applications? When a reader wants to read books electronically, the manner in which they engage with a book can affect the product’s functionality.