If you can understand and keep these five areas in mind when you are designing and developing products, you will deliver good products. Some products are really strong in one area but weak in others. Some products are strong in four of the five areas, and that may or may not be enough.
By looking at UX through these areas, you can see how products can both seem designed well and poorly at the same time.
I first encountered the five areas of UX in The UX Book by Rex Hartson and Pardha Pyla. The UX Book is basically a manual for how to do UX, and it’s the book that we use in user-centered design classes at the University of Maryland, College Park.
Even if you are a mid-career professional, having a copy of the UX Book around for reference is a good idea. I’ve taken some of the concepts that Hartson and Lyla introduced and expanded upon them.
The five areas of UX are a core component of my design critique rubric. Having agreed-upon rubrics makes design teams a lot more functional, efficient, and consistent.
Usability
How usable is this product? Discoverability and understanding are two key areas of usability. Can a user easily discover key features? Once a user discovers key features, are they able to understand how and why to use them?
Good products have both. If a user can’t discover a feature, it doesn’t exist for that user. Users should be able to easily discover features without instructions, and once they do discover a feature, they should be able to quickly understand how it works and why to use it. If a user can’t understand how to use a feature, it also doesn’t exist.
There really is no such thing as human errors — just bad design. If a product requires a lot of training or manuals, it is not usable.
A highly usable product should both be easy to learn to use and memorable so that when the next time a user uses that product, it is already second nature.
The quality and thoughtfulness of the affordances and signifiers is another core part of usability. I explain affordances and signifiers in detail here. It’s critical that you understand these foundational design concepts.
Utility
Do this product or feature help me do something? Utility gets at the value of something. Don’t confuse this with usability. Usability gets at how easy it is to use a feature or product. A product can be really easy to use, while also having little value and utility.
A website with really good information on it has high utility. Wikipedia strives to be a website that focuses first and foremost on utility, and because its utility is so good, we can forgive some of the other areas of UX where it is a bit weaker (its usability and visual design should be better).
If you’ve ever purchased a product in a store that you thought demoed well but then quickly stopped using it when you brought it home, you may have used a product with high usability and low utility.
You have most likely used other products that gave you a lot of utility, but the usability could have used a lot of work.
Utility can be user-specific. Some people may find ESPN.com to have really high utility. If a user doesn’t like sports, ESPN’s utility is pretty much zero. Utility must be viewed from the lens of your users and the different buckets your users fit within.
Functional Integrity
Does this product and its features work as intended? Is this product reliable?
Is this product well made? Is it free of defects and bugs? Does it have a high level of fit and finish?
You can have a product that has high usability and utility and is still a drag to use because it crashes a lot or key features don’t work as intended.
This is an area that a lot of product designers don’t get. They think bugs and defects are the realms of engineers, QA people, and others. That’s not true. Being free of defects and bugs is a core part of making a good user experience.
You can design a great product, but if the engineers, manufacturers, or someone else introduce a lot of bugs or defects, a product is not well designed. User experience goes far beyond product design.
This is why design, engineering, and other disciplines need to work closely together. It takes a village to make good products. This is also why you must get buy-in to stamp out bugs and defects because otherwise, your hard work will be overshadowed.
Functional integrity also refers to how consistent a product is. One of my core concepts for good product design is that a product must be both internally consistent (consistent with itself) and externally consistent(consistent with other products from the same company and consistent with well-understood concepts).
Visual Design
Is this product visually appealing? Is it edifying to use?
When given two identical products, people will prefer the product that has a superior visual design. People will pay more money for a product that looks and feels better. People will believe your product is better built if it has a good look and feel.
People will even conflate how good a product looks with how professional it is. The converse of that is that a product with poor visual design can be considered amateurish or even spammy.
You can make a product that nails every other area of UX, but if it looks and feels like a scam or spam product, people will assume it is.
Visual design without usability and utility is not very valuable, however, but don’t let your designs get too myopically functional. Make people happy with your designs. Surprise them.
What I have found is that when you boil a product down to its essence, focus on the function, and really strive to solve problems for users, you will naturally create a good visual and tactile experience. The thoughtfulness of getting a product down to its essence and core will help you focus the visual design.
Visual design is not about decadence or extraneousness. In fact, extraneous flourishes and features is a hallmark of bad design.
A lot of people think of my team as the team that makes things pretty. But making things look good is only one out of five areas that we do. The core of what we do is to make products work well, and our visual design should be an expression of that.
Persuasiveness
There are a few different ways to view persuasiveness. The most basic is the ability to complete conversions. Think of an e-commerce website. A website can be really usable, have high utility, be free of bugs and defects, be beautiful, and still not be well designed.
How?
If the job of your website is to get people to buy products and people aren’t, you have a persuasiveness issue. An e-commerce website that fails to get people to buy products can’t be considered well-designed.
In reality, if an e-commerce website has issues with persuasiveness, it probably has usability issues too. But the persuasiveness can go far beyond that. How good is the copywriting? Are there product demos? Is the checkout process as frictionless as possible? Does the company offer a great delivery and return process?
When I think of e-commerce experiences, there are a lot of decent ones. There are only a few great ones. The great ones, such as Amazon.com, nail persuasiveness.
Persuasiveness is also the ability to get people to use your product and do key tasks. The reason this is important is that even if people buy your product, if they stop using it, they won’t be likely to recommend it to other people.
The other day one of my students was telling the class about a smart water bottle she bought that is designed to get people to drink more water. She found that it hadn’t increased her water intake, and she didn’t even bring it to class that day.
The product was not persuading her to use it. Since she is not regularly using it, she is unlikely to recommend it to people to buy.
Using the five areas to critique product design
We use these five areas combined with our overall rubric to decide if one of our products or someone else’s is well designed. Sometimes it’s a really hard decision because a product may have usability issues but offer some really strong utility (smart home technologies fall into this area, where they are hard to setup, but once you get them setup, they can add a lot of value to your life).
Other products seem to nail everything, except they are really buggy. The thing is, if a product has enough functionality integrity issues, it cannot be considered well-designed and people will not want to use it.
Imagine if your smartphone crashed a few times a day at completely random times. No matter how much you loved how the phone felt and looked and how much the software and connectedness helped you out, you would look to switch to a different smartphone or maybe even consider going back to a simpler phone.
You might be thinking, what about information architecture and other core areas of UX? Information architecture is reflected in these five areas. If your website has poor information architecture, it won’t be usable.
The same logic applies to other important UX and design topics.
I hope this hopes you understand how to use and apply the five areas of UX. If you want, mention a product in the comments, and I will walk through how it does in the five areas of UX.