The difference between Usability and Experience Design

I hear a lot of people using "Usability" and "Experience design" interchangeably. This is quite a big mistake.  They are both important for product success, both are tested differently, both are successfully crafted differently, and they both need quite different focus and skill sets. Usability answers the question: "Can the user accomplish the goal"?

Experience Design answers the question: "Is the user delighted"?

Imagine you go to a retail website to buy a pair of jeans. You arrive at the homepage and easily find and navigate to the jeans that you want. You pick your size and the colour. You add them to your cart without a hitch, pay and check out. Job done: awesome.

This is usability. Your customers can easily buy products off your website. They understand what to do, it all works as expected, it's easy, and fast.

Ok. It's 5 days later and your jeans have arrived, but 3 days later than promised. They are the wrong size and the wrong brand. You can't find out how to send them back and ask for your order to be filled properly. None of this information is with your package. You go to the website and after 10mins of searching find a phone number. You're not sure whether it's a customer service number or not but you call it anyway. You listen to 5mins of options to choose from on a recording before you even get to speak to a human. Finally a tired sounding man sighs and then says "whateverjeansdotcomcustomerservicehowcanihelp?". You begin to explain your problem and he interrupts you and transfers you to somewhere else. A woman picks up and asks you what you want. You explain your problem again. She tells you that you have to go to a post office and send the package back yourself. Then you need to fax them the receipt and they'll reimburse the postage costs. She needs to refund your money for the jeans to you and needs you to go back to the website, order and pay all over again...

Will you be ordering from here again?

This is experience design. I can delight you by taking full responsibility for my mistake, and ensuring that you not only get your order the same day, but that you also are compensated for the mistake. I can also take into consideration that because I sell jeans, sometimes people will order the wrong size, so I can delight you by not penalising you for it. Instead I will include in every package a ready paid empty mail bag so you can just drop it in a post box and return it at no cost. I might determine that my customers want to experiment and try products they have never bought before. I can create a whole experience around that so that people can select a whole bunch of clothes, we ship them out to you, you try them all on and send us back what you don't want to keep. We'll charge you for the ones you keep, you don't need to go back on the website to do anything.

Delving into your user journey, seeing that this is a single purchase, I question needing to have to add it to a cart. After all in a store you wouldn't grab a shopping cart or a basket if you are about to buy one item. If I wanted to improve on the usability, I might investigate this in more depth. Can I reduce friction even more? If you are a repeat customer, can I remember your payment and shipping details for you too?

Can you see any other opportunities? I'd be learning about my customers as much as possible. Not just about the things that they tell me they want, but also by using ingenious methods to gain insights into the things they never knew they wanted. What are the unarticulated needs? What is my competition doing and how can I be a better? How do I give you a totally kickass experience that you will love and remember? How can I reach you on an emotional level?

If I have a physical store, I'll do more. I'll want to ensure that the entire experience of our brand, be it online or in the store, is always the same kind of awesomeness that you deserve as a customer, or even as a potential customer. What do you think the Amazon physical store would be like if there was one?

The Four Seasons hotels have found a common pattern where people enter their hotel room, throw their bag on the floor and coat on the bed, and then drop into the armchair...and exhale. They refer to this as something like "the exhale moment". You want to savour that moment. They have ensured that everything is in place to make that moment especially amazing. The seat itself, the proximity of reading material and the mini bar...(more about this in Tim Brown's book). Where is the "exhale moment" in your software product? I think it has its place in experience design as well.

Things you might talk about when considering usability:

• Accessibility
• Interaction design
• Layout
• Path to completion
• Funnel analysis
• Time on task
• Eye tracking
• clicks
• ...

In short, you are in the minutia of user interface design.

Things you might talk about when considering experience design:

• End-to-end customer journey
• Personas
• Behavioural
• Real world context
• Scenarios
• Ethnography
• Social science
• Perceptual psychology
• Design Thinking
• Environmental design
• ....

It's a much larger subject area than usability. It involves a lot of diverse and complex skill sets, and requires a solid understanding of psychology, business strategy, design principles, brand strategy...it is cross-disciplinary.

As a developer, you should know all about usability, especially if you are a front-end developer. You should have a fantastic grasp on how to lay things out and know all the rules and how to break them. This is not the sole responsibility of the "UX" person on your team. It is your responsibility too. It's fundamental if you want to create a quality software product. Usability is the responsibility of the team.

The real crux of the job for experience designers is being outstanding at experience design. This does not mean that as an experience designer you don't care about usability. On the contrary, it's one of the keys to success. On the other hand, you should know where the areas of improvement are, how to find out about the ones you don't suspect, know how to benchmark and measure quantitatively and qualitatively, and know the customers. You should know what they want, what they want but can't articulate, what they need from your services/products, who they are, who they might be in future, how to persuade them, know how they behave in every different scenarios, be able to understand if this reconciles with the current business strategy and know what to do if it doesn't.

Where does visual design fit in?

It is fundamentally important to have excellent visual aesthetics for your product. There is plenty of evidence about what a huge difference it makes and I rarely find anyone argue that it isn't. The mistake here is to think that this is the only aspect of design to take into consideration when actually designing a software. When you are designing a service, there will always be visual touchpoints and these need to be cared for as much as any other detail in your work. If the experience is awful like in our jeans buying example above, do you think you'd be more impressed with the service if the website and packaging looked stunning? On the other hand, do you think that you would even consider buying jeans from the website if it looked terrible?

"Design"

It's not "usability design" it's just "usability". Why does this fall to the designer on so many occasions? It is the responsibility of the whole software team to ensure that what they are making is at least usable. It's called "experience design" because it is a practice of design. Design is fundamentally about problem solving. Innovation is a design problem, for example. Design is about solving problems by finding out what they are exactly, and then executing the best solution possible. Jonathan Ive does a lovely job of summing up what it means to be a good designer in this interview. He's an industrial designer rather than an experience designer, but still design is design.

I think that the following quotes sum it up neatly:

"Design needs to be plugged into human behavior. Design dissolves in behavior." -Naoto Fukasawa

"A lot of what we are doing is getting design out of the way." -Jonathan Ive

To conclude, if you are worrying exclusively about what colour that "Add to cart" button is, rather than  considering whether you need a cart at all, and finding out what to do instead...You're not doing experience design.

Automated wisdom of crowds?

photo credit: paulhami

"The wisdom of crowds" was a book published in 2004 by James Surowiecki.

"New Yorker business columnist Surowiecki argues that "under the right circumstances, groups are remarkably intelligent, and are often smarter than the smartest people in them." To support this almost counterintuitive proposition, Surowiecki explores problems involving cognition (we're all trying to identify a correct answer), coordination (we need to synchronize our individual activities with others) and cooperation (we have to act together despite our self-interest)."

Surowiecki says that to be really useful a wise crowd needs:

- diversity of opinion - independence of members from one another; - decentralization - a good method for aggregating opinions.

Things have changes since 2004:

2004 in web terms was quite some time ago, and since then the first release of Linux Ubuntu was released, Apple started using intel processors, Microsoft Vista came and went, xbox was released, as was the MacBook Pro, playstation 3 and Wii. Android was launched, and so was Mac OS X and Windows 7. From a social perspective a lot of things happened since 2004 too. Social networks appeared, grew and folded and in 2006, the largest social network was MySpace, but Facebook quickly took over by 2008. Other social networks like Flickr, Photobucket, YouTube, and so on became central to people's every day lives. Digg, Reddit, Delicious, Tumbler, Twitter, Posterous...they all emerged, grew and are not embedded in our lives. And all that since 2004. The web moves fast.

Crowd sourcing has since been used by countless companies, agencies and groups. Threadless is a t-shirt company that uses crows to decide on which t-shirts they print, the British government uses it, web designers, all sorts of people. It's become a commonplace tool. Tech companies have also made use of crowd sourcing to tag data.

This brings me to a cool paper doing the rounds right now:

"The Multidimensional Wisdom of Crowds" by Peter Welinder, Steve Branson, Serge Belongie, Pietro Perona from the California Institute of Technology.

"We present a method for estimating the underlying value (e.g. the class) of each image from (noisy) annotations provided by multiple annotators. Our method is based on a model of the image formation and annotation process. Each image has different characteristics that are represented in an abstract Euclidean space. Each annotator is modeled as a multidimensional entity with variables representing competence, expertise and bias. This allows the model to discover and represent groups of annotators that have different sets of skills and knowledge, as well as groups of images that differ qualitatively. We find that our model predicts ground truth labels on both synthetic and real data more accurately than state of the art methods. Experiments also show that our model, starting from a set of binary labels, may discover rich information, such as different “schools of thought” amongst the annotators, and can group together images belonging to separate categories."

They go on to describe the Amazon Mechanical Turk method (MTurk), which involves getting hundreds of workers to label data. The same method has been used to label large datasets in computer vision and computational linguistics. The annotators are not always very reliable, so the crowd model allows for these flaws to be rectified. The authors present a method that involves as few annotators as possible to achieve the same crowd corrected results.

They use a generative Bayesian model for the annotation process and an inference algorithm to estimate the properties of the data being labeled and the annotators labeling them.The paper is freely available so I won't go into detail. Their results, however, show that a machine can approximate the wisdom of crowds probabilities.

"Experiments with images annotated by MTurk workers show that indeed different annotators have variable competence level and widely different biases, and that the annotators’ classification criterion is best modeled in multidimensional space. Ultimately, our model can accurately estimate the ground truth labels by integrating the labels provided by several annotators with different skills, and it does so better than the current state of the art methods."

And yet more research:

Vassilis Kostakos from CMU presented research last year, showing that a small group are responsible for the votes and ratings on IMdb, Bookcrossings, and Amazon. Additionally, this group have varied voting patterns.

So...

If you're a neuroscientist, then should your review on a neuroscience book or some such should be weighted higher than the review of a layman? I think that it depends what kind of book you're after. If you're a layman yourself, then maybe the layman review is more useful to you. The matter of how qualified someone is to answer a question on Quora or give an opinion on a product is interesting, because it affects the quality of the overall opinions on the network. The figure that keeps coming back (from YouTube, Wikipedia, IMdb) is that 1% or less of all registered users get involved. That is indeed a small number, and how representative is that group of the whole community?

I have a good feeling that using humans for labelling tasks may be a thing of the past soon. It makes me think about how "computer" was a job description once, and doing those calculations was the job a person.