In recent years, user experience design as the most important design process, is well-known to the general public. And the term“usability ”also plays an important role in improving the UX. Besides, there comes out a specialized position named as ”usability engineers” in Europe and the United States.

However, the more of the technical terms come out, the less they can understand the difference, especially, the usability and user experience are confused by many designers. Although this topic has been discussed in many posts. But it is still necessary for me to clear it out the difference between user experience and usability based on my years of research on user experience and product usability.

1. Definition of User Experience and Usability

User experience refers to a person’s subjective feeling and attitudes about using a particular product. It includes the functional scope, product brand, psychological expectation, and actual emotional feeling. These are an indispensable parts of the user experience.

Usability is an important quality indicator for interactive IT products/systems. It refers to the degree to which products are effective, easy to use, easy to learn, efficient, fewer errors and satisfying to users. Usability is mainly about the functional part of the product. In a word, “Don’t make me think”. Remember, stop making usability mistake as they can kill your website conversions.

The typical usability issues in a user-centered design environment include:

Evaluate overall effectiveness and efficiency of the product, and take it as the design goal.

Evaluate user comfort and satisfaction degree, and take it as the design goal.

Design the product for making it easy to use, and can evaluate usability issue.

The typical user experience issues in a user-centered design environment include:

Design and evaluate for what the users do in the process of starting and ending interactivity with the product.

Maximize the realization of the stimulus, recognition and arouse the emotional resonance.

2. Four elements of the Usability

Functionality: Can this product work normally?

Learnability: Can this product be used without extra learning?

Flexibility: Can this product do something more except accomplishing the main task?

Industry design: Is this product pretty enough?

Plus, keep these 5 crucial usability principles in mind all the time.

3. Four elements of the User Experience

Usability: Is it easy to complete tasks?

Adaptability: Will people start using the product?

Desirability: Is the experience fun and engaging?

Value: Does a product provide value to users?

4. Different goal of User Experience and Usability

For a website, the only usability goals is “easy to use”. However…