User Experience 101

What is the difference between user experience (ux), usability, and utility?

User Experience (UX) = Utility + Usability

User Experience (UX) is the summation of a person emotional motivation and ease in using a particular object. Utility is the satisfaction or value a person gets from a human made object. It represents the motivation reasons for a person to use a particular object.

Factors that affect Utility

• Better: How does usage improve my quality of life compare to alternatives?

• Cheaper: How does usage reduce my financial or time cost compare to alternatives?

Usability is the ease of use of a human made object. It represents the hygiene reasons (effectiveness, efficiency and satisfaction) why a person should continue use of a particular object. For web applications, it typically involves tweaking the user interface (UI).

Factors affecting User Experience (Conversion Hub’s Human Factors Usability Design)

• Harmonius: Effectiveness
  In 2012, Google reported 30 trillion unique URLs on the web. In the context of such user competition, what is your site value? How does the proposed feature set or content complement a user’s life? What need or pain point(s) does it resolves and is it significant?

• Usable: Efficiency
  How user friendly can user perform task? How efficient is your user interface? Does it take an average user 10 minutes or 10 seconds to perform the desired task?

• Memorable: Memorability & Learnability
  How easy is it to accomplish a task now and in the future? Does it take a new user 1 second or 1 minute to figure out how to perform a task? Does a recurring user spend less time figuring out how to perform a task the 2nd time as compared to his/her 1st time?

• Accessible: Ease of Task Recovery
  How many failed task does your user make? How easy is it for a user to recover from a failed task? Is your site accessible to people with disability? (WorldBank – 1 Billion People or 15% of the world population is disabled) Today, this makes good business sense and it is the ethical thing to do. Eventually, it will become the law.

• Net Promoter: Satisfaction
  How pleasant is the overall experience of using your website? Do I move to the point that I recommend it to a friend?

Also take a look at Peter Morville‘s User Experience Honeycomb

If you contrast the old computer operating interface of the 1980s and 2010s, we have evolved from