Defining Usability, User Expericence, Utility, and Usage
Posted: November 25th, 2006 | 1 Comment »Some of the feedback I receive on my research plan highlight my misuse of the terms usability, user experience, utility, and usage. Sara Ljunblad’s User Driven Design course provide some clarifications.
First of all HCI aims at developing or improving the safety, utility, effectiveness, efficiency, and usability of systems that include computers (Interacting with Computers, 1989, p. 3). Utility refers to the functionality of a system and usability is about making systems easy to learn and easy to employ.
Usability can be broken down into the following goals:
- Effective to use (effectiveness)
- Efficient to use (efficiency)
- Safe to use (safety)
- Have good utility (utility)
- Easy to lean (learnability)
- Easy to remember how to use (memorability)
Interaction design aims at creating user experiences that enhance and extend the way people work, communicate and interact. It shares the same fundamentals as HCI in terms of usability goals and design methodology, but it is also concerned about creating systems that are:
- Satisfying
- Enjoyable
- Fun
- Entertaining
- Helpful
- Motivating
- Aesthetically pleasing
- Supportive of creativity
- Rewarding
- Emotionally fulfilling
Usage is the act, manner or amount of using.
Relation to my thesis: I do not investigate in the field of user experience as its scope is very large and highly subjective therefore difficult to quantify and evaluate in a scientific way. I mention “enhance the usability of location-aware system” as a very abstract goal. This might need to be reformulated.
Usability is a very abstract and individual thing, however one of the most important things. I have done resarch in the field of “Mobile Government” and especially application design in the public sector. And one of the key issues was (and probably is) user experience vs user expectation. And the usability (services and applications) plays a major role on the road to broad user acceptance.
Wherever your paper is headed, you most definitely need to reformulate … waiting to see more results, l like your research subject and would like to exchange on the results.