Usability is user experience

The fundamental difference is “Can easily use” vs. “Want to use”. Let’s take the best possible example here – the usability guru: Jakob Nielsen’s website. Usability guru that he is, his site is very functional and easy to use. But how do you think it scores on user experience? Would visitors love to browse the site for better experience? The answer is no.

Again, there are some practitioners who believe building a good user experience is all that’s needed for making the site usable. That had led to the myth in question. Superior user experiences have failed miserably in usability, as it’s just one of the dimensions of usability. It is still important to have the right balance.

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Usability is good design

Good design (leaving apart the subjective angle) is only an element or output of usability – in practical sense. Otherwise, it’s more like a philosophy. Usability done with a philosophy of good design, would make it effective, error-tolerant, engaging, etc. This part I echo. My argument is towards the literal aspect about the myth, that a good design brings usability. In a way, this has a resemblance to Usability is User Experience. A good user interface design is not going to save a product if it is not useful or low on performance or erroneous. The usability and acceptance of such products have no connection with the presence or absence of good design.

This had to be shared immediately. Not completely safe for work — towards the end.

The George Foreman Grill is on its way, Ian!

Normally a web-based company that decides to make an app wants to translate the look and feel of its site to that app. But Kayak has been there, done that. And from the design team to the executive team, those within Kayak say it now makes more sense to do the opposite. “I got to the point where I actually liked iPhone app better than our website, I thought it was aesthetically more beautiful,” Kayak co-founder and CTO Paul English told me in an interview last week.

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At its design lab up on Concord, Mass. Kayak does eye-tracking studies to see what users are or are not using. “Our design goal – if something is on the screen and people aren’t clicking on, we remove it,” said English. The overall goal in making the site look more like a mobile app is to shed unnecessary details and simplify.

Code cannot come before UX. Design the experience before you code it. Art takes time and has to be at the core of your product/service. If you don’t have a designer as one of your first three team members, well, in my humble opinion, you’re already in trouble.

To illustrate, here are some details I assess when every new venture comes my way: Email structure, word choice, the signature, the amount of deck slides, the weight of the presentation, whether the dollar sign is placed before or after the amount, the choice of stock photography, whether MS Clipart was used, the thickness of the business card, the choice of typography, even the entrepreneur’s choice of laptop and phone.

All of these go to the heart of our assessment the product/service, the team and the venture as a whole.

It’s about the sizzle, which is UX. It sells the product. If you don’t have a great UX, investors have to be aware there are going to be many, many other costs, like additional marketing, to make a product successful.

Great UX is art, but it’s worth it.

Culture is a balanced blend of human psychology, attitudes, actions, and beliefs that combined create either pleasure or pain, serious momentum or miserable stagnation. A strong culture flourishes with a clear set of values and norms that actively guide the way a company operates. Employees are actively and passionately engaged in the business, operating from a sense of confidence and empowerment rather than navigating their days through miserably extensive procedures and mind-numbing bureaucracy. Performance-oriented cultures possess statistically better financial growth, with high employee involvement, strong internal communication, and an acceptance of a healthy level of risk-taking in order to achieve new levels of innovation.

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“A degree or a certificate isn’t going to magically get you respect, make you employable, get you on the speaker circuit, cure acne, or make you more attractive to the love of your life. A degree is not going to instantly improve your UX skills. Only lots and lots of practice can do that. All of the employers of UX professionals that I know—myself included—are looking for experience first and above all. However, that doesn’t mean a degree is useless.”

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“Of course, having a degree gets you past foolish HR departments that require a degree. However, remember that people who require a degree also look at applicants’ experience. The most experience wins—the degree just lets you take part in the race.”