Reflection – Usability vs. User Experience

One of the questions that we had to reflect about was “What is the difference between User Experience Evaluation and Usability Evaluation?”.

I believe the usability evaluation deals with if the product is usable or not. A really good example could be a regular wheelchair. When we evaluate usability, we can ask ourselves questions like “Can the user drive it forward?”, “Will it tip over?” and questions like that. The usability evaluation I would say is much more straight forward, and you can measure the answer easier. The example questions I stated can easily be measured in some way.

When it comes to user experience evaluation, we enter much foggier ground. User experience deals with how the user feels about using the product. Here, I think the questions are much harder to determine, and often they cannot be answered (and measured) by a simple yes or no. In one way you can say that this is also much more important. A product could have very good usability, but if the experience is bad the customer won’t use it (if we don’t force it in him/her by not giving other options). Our wheelchair could be usable as intended, but if the person using doesn’t feel safe using it, or if he/she thinks it looks really bad, she probably don’t want to use it if there are other, better, options.