[Sigia-l] Usability in Fancy Clothes?

[Patrick Hunt]

I have some catching up to do. 443 unread messages in my SIGIA folder 
is a Bad Thing, especially with Apple's Mail.app for OS X (writing to 
disk... writing to disk...).

<snip>
> Did someone say user experience design is usability dressed up in fancy
> clothes? I don't think so.
>
> Usability asks if the interaction is right ("right" being defined by 
> some
> accepted standard).
>
> User experience design asks if it is the right interaction.
</snip>

While I have no context for this debate as of yet, I think this is an 
interesting and important distinction. It takes the old adage of "doing 
the right things; doing things the right way" and applies them to ux 
and usability. I would argue, though, that the latter is not as much 
right according to some standard as it is right according to users. 
Standards are simply a way of extrapolating observations of one 
instance and applying them to multiple instances. Still, observations 
of the subsequent instance are necessary to determine if the 
extrapolation was valid and appropriate. A significant danger is for 
standards to become conventions solely as a result of familiarity. Just 
because something is common does not mean that it is right; but 
conventions that are also good are... well... good.

It is possible for a usability professional or usability assessment to 
assess not only the isolated usability issues, but also the contextual 
ones (aka, user experience). This is true too in the reverse direction: 
a holistic user experience evaluation would consider usability. In some 
sense, this is akin to the age-old strategy v implementation debate. 
I've always found it best to combine these two competencies in the team 
assigned to solve a problem.