Understanding the Difference between User Experience (UX) and Usability

In the recent past, you must have come across these two terms used interchangeably by designers across the world. For a layman, there is not much difference between these two terms, though they stand apart when looked and pondered upon carefully. In this post, we will try differentiating both these terms and understand their implications in a better way.

User Experience (UX)

Use experience is pretty subjective, and it includes all the emotional and functional response of an end-user towards a particular product of a brand. It may include all the services and products and the company in general itself. Designers should focus on the user experience, adaptability, desirability, and the value of the product.

Usability

Usability refers to more about the degree of ease with which a user can operate a product—it includes the degree of ease of learning. The degree of ease of learning to use the product, the degree of making fewer errors while using the product, and the degree of satisfaction a user gets while using the product. While designers focus on usability, they focus on functionality, learnability, flexibility, and the industry-design of the product.

Different goals of both the terms

It is essential to know what their goals regarding a product are. So, for example, in the case of a website, the only usability goal would be to be easy—so that the user could use the site quickly. However, regarding the user experience, the website’s overall experience and how it interacted with the user is crucial, how the user feels while using the site, and even after using it—both these scenarios would include the user experience.