UX glossary · engl. User Experience
User Experience
User experience (UX) covers everything people perceive and feel before, during and after using a product or service. Usability is one part of it.
Imagine you book a train journey online. It takes two minutes, the website is clear, and everything works. On the day of travel, your train is canceled, the app shows no alternative, and the hotline is constantly busy. The website was easy to use. The overall experience was still bad.
That gap is exactly what the term user experience describes.
Explained simply
User experience, or UX for short, covers everything people perceive and feel around a product or service: before they use it, while they use it and afterwards. Think of a night out at a restaurant. What matters isn’t just whether the menu is easy to read. The booking, the wait for a table, the food, the bill and how you feel when you leave all count too.
The standard ISO 9241-210 defines user experience, in essence, as a person’s perceptions and responses resulting from the actual or anticipated use of a system, product or service. That includes emotions, beliefs, preferences, physical and psychological responses, behavior and accomplishments. The word “anticipated” matters: UX starts before anyone touches a product, for example while reading reviews.
The term was popularized mainly by Don Norman. He joined Apple in 1993 and held the title “User Experience Architect” there. He didn’t invent the phrase, though. It had appeared here and there before.
User experience vs. usability
The two terms are often mixed up. Usability describes how easy a product is to use: whether people reach their goal effectively, efficiently and with satisfaction. User experience is broader and includes usability. Don Norman and Jakob Nielsen describe UX as every aspect of the interaction with a company, its services and its products.
So good usability is a prerequisite for good UX, but no guarantee. A product can be perfectly usable and still fail to offer what people need. Content, service, delivery times, prices and brand perception shape the experience too. The same goes for the interface: the user interface is an important part of UX, but only one part. You can read more in What Is User Experience?.
An example
Here’s an example: a gym offers an app for booking classes. The app is fast and well structured. Still, many members are frustrated because popular classes fill up within minutes and nobody finds out when a spot opens up.
The team adds a waiting list with notifications and shows how many spots are left for each class. The app works almost exactly as before. But the whole class booking experience is much better, because it now fits the members’ expectations and daily routines.
In practice
- Look beyond the screen. A journey map shows every touchpoint from the first impression to support and reveals where the experience breaks.
- Talk to real people. User research shows what people expect and where they get frustrated, before your team turns assumptions into features.
- Measure more than clicks. Combine behavioral data with surveys and observation, because feelings and expectations rarely show up directly in analytics numbers.
Related terms
Usability, Journey Map, User Research, Mental Model