March 05, 2002

Usability is not customer experience

This may well be the last word, in my opinion, on the subject:

Evan reviews Spolsky's UI book, quoting [quoting Spolsky, that is]

"Usability is not everything. If usability engineers designed a nightclub,
it would be clean, quiet, brightly lit, with lots of places to sit down,
plenty of bartenders, menus written in 18-point sans-serif, and easy-to-find
bathrooms. But nobody would be there. They would all be down the street at
Coyote Ugly pouring beer on each other."

No arguments there, but there's a difference between usability and customer
experience (as Mark Hurst has been going on about for years): customer
experience delivers what the customer wants, usability makes it easy to use.
Customers don't want a clean, well-lit nightclub, they want dirty, dark
bachanalia, so give it to them. Othertimes usability and customer experience
are the same thing. But customer experience comes before usability.

Zimran in the 3/4/02 winterspeak newsletter.

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