Distinguishing between UCD, UX, and usability
A friend and sometimes client told me over lunch this week, “I think of you as the usability guy.” I didn’t much care for this, because I think of usability in terms of project plans rather than an identity to aspire to. It got me thinking about related terms, like “user experience” (UX), and its cousin, user-centered design (UCD). As a result of those thoughts, I would like to take some time to differentiate these terms, because even though they are often used interchangeably, I think they are different in ways that are important to design work in related but distinct fields.
Usability has been around for quite a while. It became prominent as a practice in the software world, and was quickly applied to web sites when they became prominent in the 1990’s. Usability focuses on ease of use. Usability testing is often used to evaluate an existing system or design work in progress to make it easier, quicker, less prone to errors, more intuitive.
User experience (UX) takes a broader view. Not only doing things right, but doing the right things. User experience strategy looks first at the market, then at the competitive landscape, then at possibilities for design components, then at data to support various approaches. User experience design covers touchpoints in multiple channels to create a single experience. While everything from burning your toast in the morning to taking a Caribbean cruise could be described as an experience, there are many more impressions, emotions, results, benefits, costs, memories, etc. associated with the cruise. In the same way, I can talk about the user experience of any web site, but all web site experiences are not on the same level.
Sometimes a minimal experience on a web site is a good experience, like when I’m paying a parking ticket online. Other times, the well-conceived online experience spreads across many sales channels, areas of life, personality traits, needs, social interactions, etc. I think the car configurator on the BMW-USA site is a good example of a web site that is focused on an overall user experience. Some travel sites also bring into the online experience an awareness of the overall experience that supports different design priorities than if I strictly focused on the requirements for the transactions at hand. It still needs to be usable, but that is at the bare minimum level of requirements. The design needs to not only be intuitive, it needs to inspire, make you imagine the possibilities. And for home improvement or financial services, the user experience has to be completely different in order to realize optimal results. They all need to be usable, but that’s just the beginning.
User experience can be applied to any consumer product or service. I associate my ipod with having a good user experience. When I sit (for hours) writing in the local university Starbucks, I would feel awkward having a CD player, changing disks every once in a while. I have a lot of music in it that I like, it is light, looks like I fit (somewhat) in the scene. I don’t find it a particularly usable device. I had to ask my 12 year old son how to do various things, like turn it on, get music on it, etc. But in terms of the overall experience I like it.
User-centered design (UCD) is a phrase that is used in different ways by different people. I hear it most often as a promotional bullet for the various agencies I subcontract to, i.e. “We deploy user-centered design methodologies.” I think of it somewhat like the Copenican revolution. Nothing physically changed when people learned that the earth revolved around the sun. It was a question of perspective. And for me that’s the focus of UCD. Looking at a user interface, does its structure and terminology reflect the perspective of the people who sponsored it, the people who designed it, the people who developed it, or the people who use it?
I’ve worked with various insurance providers and interviewed insurance consumers on multiple occasions. I assure you, providers and consumers think about insurance very differently. If the site is structured as providers think about insurance, then it will start with GET A QUOTE NOW, then provide navigation to types of insurance, talk about coverage types, levels of coverage, and situations that require various types of coverage. That’s how their business is structured. Many consumers I’ve talked to, on the other hand, want to figure out what “somebody like me” usually gets. I have X dollars invested in my car/house/boat, and I want to ensure that if any of the typical disasters befalls me, I will be covered to the degree that I feel comfortable with. They don’t want to be oversold, and they don’t want to expose themselves to foolish risks. To be user centered means to step back from the basic business structure and determine the kinds of interactivity, messaging, and content will meet prospective customers where they are in the process, and speak to their desire for the right fit, rather than seeing how much we can sell them in one swell foop.
I’ve also worked as a researcher, strategist, and designer on many e-commerce projects. The design of an e-commerce site should always be based on the characteristics of the people who represent the greatest long-term value, and the way that they shop for the particular category of merchandise offered by the e-retailer. Designing an optimal e-commerce site therefore requires, at a minimum, a customer model and a purchase model. Very simple models for sites that realize only hundreds of thousands of visitors per year, very involved models for sites that have millions of visitors per month. To be user centered means to be designed in a way that makes the most sense to your primary customer segments. Usability is still very relevant, but it is the minimum set of standards. The user experience of an e-commerce site may be important, but for many types of sites, the overall experience can be minimal and still be very successful. The bar should be set according to the needs of the most valuable customer types.
Software designers seem to get up in arms about UCD. This is understandable. Software is typically “centered” on a set of tasks, like producing a document or editing photos. It doesn’t behave substantially differently for different user types, although it does need to accommodate different levels of expertise. To be successful, it needs to be usable, intuitive, quick to learn yet powerful. That’s why Adobe or Microsoft can make decisions about changing user interfaces counter to their current users’ wishes, but better for their overall product development. It’s because they are focused on evolving the task capabilities and increasing sales, not catering to user preferences. There are, of course, exceptions, and the lines between software and web sites are much blurrier than they used to be. But in terms of user requirements, software primarily needs to do what it does best in a way that is easy to use and useful, which are qualities that usability testing methods focus on. Is the user experience of software important? Of course. But MS Word isn’t going to follow me to the mall or the ball game. The experience ends when I say Quit. And that just isn’t true for the BMW online experience described above.
So, my point? My hypothesis?
Usability: Important for all digital experiences, however, for software design and development it is a critical measuring stick. Software should be continually shaped by on-going, small rounds of usability testing.
UCD: Web sites should speak the language of the people who use them, not the organizations that sponsor them or the people who design and develop them. UCD best practices should be adopted at the beginning of every web site project, scaled appropriately to the budget and the anticipated revenue or other gain.
UX: Products, services, public spaces, and web sites that need to span multiple channels and areas of life will fall or rise based on their user experience design. I scan a wide set of forums in many topic areas. What is the palabra mainly about? Experiences. Customer experience is gaining momentum as an entity in its own right, and given the evolution of online tools, this trend is not going to reverse for quite some time.
Copyright 2009, Paul Bryan, Usography Corporation (http://www.usography.com)
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