You're on a walk with a friend when you come across a very pleasant looking pizzeria. Your friend says she’s eaten there before and that the pizzas were excellent, she recommends that you eat there at some point. You have a great impression of the place already, so you make a note to yourself to try it out.

Later that week you look up the pizzeria. They have your favorite pizza, and you are so pleased that you are able to add extra Kalamata olives to it. You get the pizza and a drink. The ordering process was smooth and the pizza is said to arrive in 30 minutes, excellent! You expect the pizza will be delicious like your friend said. 

An hour later the pizza arrives. The pizza is cold, the olives are missing, and they’ve sent the wrong drink. You call the restaurant but no one picks up. You keep calling and finally get through on the third try. A grumpy employee picks up and tells you there is nothing they can do. This experience did not meet your expectations, and you will not be a returning customer.

Let’s evaluate this scenario, what went wrong? At first, you were excited to discover the pizzeria and try their food. While using the pizzeria’s website you were very satisfied with the ordering process. Everything was fine until you placed the order and had to wait an hour for the delivery. From then on, you started having a bad experience. 

This scenario highlights the importance of paying attention to both usability and user experience. The pizzeria’s website had great usability, but the user still had a bad user experience at the end of the day.

How can you ensure that users have a good experience throughout the process of accomplishing a goal? To answer this question we need to understand the meaning of usability and user experience, their differences, and how they are related. 

What is Usability?

The International Organisation for Standardisation (ISO) defines usability as,

“The extent to which an interactive system can be used by specified users to achieve specified goals with effectiveness, efficiency and satisfaction in a specified context of use.”

In other words, usability relates to the ease with which a user is able to achieve their goal while using an interactive system (e.g. the pizzeria’s website). In the example above, when we talk about usability we are only concerned with the experience of the user while using the pizzeria’s website. Not about their good experience prior to using the site when the user discovered the pizzeria, or their bad experience after placing the order.

How can we improve usability?

How usable an interactive system is depends primarily on three factors: effectiveness, efficiency, and satisfaction.

Effectiveness is about how well an interactive system allows users to complete the tasks they intended to with the system. When judging the effectiveness of a system you should ask: did the actual outcome of using the system meet the expected outcome? Were all intended outcomes met?

Efficiency concerns the resources used such as time, effort, and money in relation to the results achieved. For a system to be efficient, users should be able to complete their tasks using an appropriate amount of resources.

Satisfaction is about how well the physical, cognitive and emotional responses that result from using an interactive system meet the users expectations.

Like the three legs of a stool, a shortcoming in even one element affects the others and hinders usability.

In the example above, the user was able to achieve their goal of ordering pizza, so the pizzeria’s website was effective. They were able to do it fast and with little effort, making it efficient. The effectiveness and efficiency led to the user being satisfied with the experience of using the pizzeria’s website. Thus, overall the pizzerias website had good usability. But alas, at the end of the day we still had an unhappy customer? Why?

Because usability is only a part of user experience. Hence, good usability does not guarantee a good user experience, but without good usability you can’t have good user experience either. Let's dig a bit deeper into exactly what user experience is.

What is User Experience?

The International Organisation for Standardisation (ISO) defines user experience (UX) as,

“A user’s perceptions and responses that result from the use and/or anticipated use of an interactive system.”

While the focus for usability is to make an interactive system easy to use, the key to a good user experience is to make sure users feel satisfied before, during, and after using an interactive system.

In the example above, the user was having a great experience at the start when he saw the pizzeria and his friend spoke highly of it. The user was anticipating that he would have a great experience ordering and eating pizza. He was still having a good experience while using the interactive system (the pizzeria website). His experience started deteriorating the moment he had to wait longer than 30 minutes for this order and later got worse when the incorrect order arrived, and the pizzeria did not make up for the mistake. The pizzeria no longer met his expectations and he was no longer satisfied, resulting in a bad user experience.

How can we improve user experience?

User experience is mainly about satisfaction and fulfillment of expectations. These expectations can be shaped by prior experiences, brand image presentation, functionality and performance of the system, interactive behavior and assistive capabilities. The user’s skills, attitude, and personality all play a role in user experience as well. Which is why it is essential to have a toughrough understanding of the ‘context of use’ when designing an interactive system.

The context of use has five main components: 1. Who are the users? 2. What goals are they trying to achieve using the system? 3. What are the tasks they will perform in order to achieve their goal? 4. What resources will they use? 5. What kind of social and physical environments are they in when using the interactive system?

Good UX design requires an iterative development process where every touchpoint of the user journey is polished through continuous research, planning and testing.

References

International Organisation for Standardisation, 1998. ISO9241 Ergonomic, Part 11: Guidance on usability. Geneva, Switzerland.