Usability vs. User Experience

You might be reading this because you’ve heard the words “Usability” and “User Experience(UX)” and began to wonder if they meant the same thing. 

They both start with “Us”, must be some synonym or something — Oh ok, I’m the only one who thought that. 

Let’s carry on.

Usability

For some reason, I kept spelling “Usability” as “Usuability” — What a mess, right? 

Usability (or formerly labeled “User-Friendly” until the early 1900s) is how easy and intuitive it is for users to carry out a task, whether it’s a product, service, business or whatever. 

The official ISO 9241–11 definition of usability is: “the extent to which a product can be used by specified users to achieve specified goals with effectiveness, efficiency, and satisfaction in a specified context of use.”

User Experience (UX)

UX is sort of a grandparent to Usability. It’s all about “U” — Yes you! You wonderful users. 

UX encompasses all aspects of the user's interaction with the company, its services, and its products. Here it’s all about the users and the seamless merge of multiple disciplines (including engineering, marketing, graphical and industrial design, and interface design) to create a better experience.

It’s an intersection of user needs, business needs, and technical feasibility, with users being the center. It’s far too broad to cover and I don’t want to ‘excite’ you with the technicalities.

Now let’s look at the differences between Usability and UX, 

Spelling

Firstly, they are spelled differently. Usability is spelled “U-S-A-B-I-L-I-T-Y” and User Experience “U-S-E-R E-X-P-E-R-I-E-N-C-E”.

Ok, let’s look at actual differences — asides their spelling.

Elements

Usability is more concerned with components like functionality, learnability, flexibility, and industrial/interface design.

While UX components include usability, adaptability, desirability, accessibility, value/useful content, and credibility.

Goal

The main goal of usability is functionality and ease of use. Literally “Don’t make me think”. It’s more about the tasks in themselves. 

While UX is about the emotional and psychological connection users have with a task.

As a Question

Usability asks the question “Can the users accomplish their goal?” while UX asks the question “Did the users have a good experience?”.

Scope

Usability, as you can tell, is more narrow and focused. And even when measuring usability, it is more quantifiable and objective. 

But UX is more broad and holistic. It’s less quantifiable and is very subjective. 

In UX, the default answer to anything is “It depends”. Then you can go ahead to define what it depends on because we are dealing with humans and people are different. Hence the need to create personas and user stories to give more clarity.

It’s easier to determine the success rate of a task than to understand why different users don’t complete a particular task.

Yes, usability is a part of UX. 

But just, because something is easy to use, doesn't equal good user experience. And having a beautiful interface doesn't equal to being easy to use. 

Now, that’s a quality life lesson right there.