1. What is UX, anyway? (feat. Dr. Jakob Nielsen, the usability guru)
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Welcome to the Nielsen Norman Group UX podcast. I'm your host, Therese Fessenden, and I am a user experience specialist at Nielsen Norman Group, also known as NNG. We're an independent user experience research firm dedicated to improving the everyday experience of using technology,

Since its inception on August 8th, 1998, NNG has evaluated and tested thousands of websites, applications, and other digital interfaces with users all over the world. Through all of that research, we've learned a thing or two about how people think and how they use technology. It's our mission to share our research insights with people like you so that we can help make the world a better place, one experience at a time.

But what is a user experience anyway? It's a highly contested term in the industry. So to answer that, I decided to interview one of our co-founders, Jacob Nielsen, also known as the Usability Guru.

He's a researcher and author of 13 books on usability, including Usability Engineering and Designing Web Usability, along with hundreds of other influential academic articles on web usability. In this interview, we talk about what UX is, how it relates to usability, and more importantly, what those definitions mean with our work in technology.

So it's my pleasure to welcome the usability guru himself, Dr. Jacob Nielsen. So I guess I'll start by saying welcome. Welcome, Jacob. Thank you for joining us. How are you doing? Oh, great. Thank you, Therese. It's fun to be here.

Yes, I'm really excited to bring the world of UX to our audience. So I guess let's start there. First of all, who is NNG? How would you describe what NNG does to our listeners? Well, we are very focused on user experience. There's a lot of things we don't do. We are not a web design firm, when you think of that. We just purely, purely do user experience. And within that area,

We have a variety of different things we do. So we do independent research. So we study on our own various issues in that field. And this is independent research we fund ourselves. That means that we can say whatever we want, anything we find, we can just say, even if it's a famous company and we want to say their website is terrible or their…

work or a technology that everybody is promoting. I particularly remember back in, this is a long time ago now, but back when all the big telephone companies in the world were pushing very heavily these web phones or WAP. That was before the age of the screen phones or the smartphones or iPhones.

And we just studied and we found that users simply didn't want them. They couldn't use them. They had terrible difficulties. And we said so, despite the entire world's telecommunications industry basically pushing something else. We said, no, actual studies of real people shows this is the wrong thing to do. So I said, WAP stands for Wrong Approach to Portability Technology.

And so we were able to say so because we weren't dependent on funding from anybody. So that's the first thing we do, independent research. The second thing we do is kind of easy to explain. It's consulting. So we'll help clients in making their design better or their processes better or something like that.

And then we do training, which is that we basically teach people how to do user experience. We have a conference series, which is virtual on the internet. So people from anywhere in the world can attend. We also do it in-house with clients.

And so actually, and then one more thing we do is that we just publish a lot of user experience information. So, I mean, of course, this podcast is one, but we also have other media forums. We have a lot of articles on our website. We have more than a thousand articles on our website for free for anybody to read. We also have a popular video series on YouTube. And so there's a lot of different ways in which people can find out all this information that we've discovered through that independent research.

Yes. And I think you've really nailed it. And that's something I'm excited. I'm very excited to be part of this company and to contribute to this growing body of research that is readily available to the world. I guess this is where I'd love to ask the million dollar question. What is UX? How would you define what UX is?

Well, we have a definition actually on our website that comes from Don Norman, who was this other co-founder of the company. He actually made up this term user experience back when he worked at Apple. And so we use that definition also when we started Niels Norman Group, which is that user experience is the totality of the user's interaction with the company. So it's

The user interface on the screen for sure, but it also would include a lot of other things such as customer support, customer service, manuals, instructional information. Even the marketing will set the stage for users' expectations when they open up a piece of software or go to a website the first time. So all of these things are really the total user experience.

Absolutely. That's something I'm fascinated by. I guess I'm also curious how you are known as the usability guru. I think oftentimes people associate UX with usability and they are absolutely very much hand in hand. I'm curious how you see the definition of each of these and how they relate to each other. Yeah. Well, usability is making computers easy to use, actually making anything easy to use.

And we actually have one of our videos on YouTube is that we asked some of our conference attendees, what is their kind of elevator speech when they try to explain what they do to friends and family? And for me personally, I just want, I usually say I make computers easy to use. And so that's really my definition of usability is making computers easy to use. There's also a more formal definition, which is,

Usability has five quality components that are all measurable. And so that is ease of learning. So if you don't know the system, how quickly can you accomplish tasks starting from knowing nothing? The second is efficiency of use. So once you've learned it, how many tasks can you perform per hour? How quickly can you get things done? Then there's memorability, which is if you have used it in the past,

and then there's a break and then you come back can you then resume with a sort of good level of proficiency or do you have to learn it all over again which would be bad

And then there's error rate or error proneness, which is how many user errors do you make? And of course, we want that to be as low as possible. And for certain applications, this is crucial. Like a lot of safety or medically related applications, you really, really don't want to have errors happen. And even for things like e-commerce, if people order the wrong thing, it's very expensive to process those returns. And then the last of the five quality criteria is pleasant to user satisfaction. So we want all of those.

learnability, efficiency, memorability, low error rate, and satisfaction. Those five are the definition of usability. Then if you turn to UX, which is like the totality of the user's experience with the company, well,

You want that to have those quality criteria and possibly some more as well. But usability is just that the quality. Is it easy or is it not easy to use and pleasant? That's sort of the part of user experience. It's a very important part.

Yeah, and this is an industry, I think, that is totally subject to vocabulary sprawl, where there's always new words or new ways to define things. What do you think now about how that definition has changed over the years? How do you think the word UX is used now? Do you like how it's used now? Do you not like how it's used now? Yeah, I feel that there is, in fact, a problem there in that

I said we had the definition we used when we started Nielsen Norman Group 22 years ago, which was even an older definition Don had come up with beforehand.

But as it turns out, that's not really the way this term is being used today. It has, I think, a slightly more narrow meaning in most people's minds that is more related to kind of user interface design, which is fine. I mean, but and then people have started saying, well, but we also have customer experience as being a broader thing than user experience. But if you remember the definition we used,

User experience is supposed to be, at least we think, the totality of the customer's interaction with the company. And that's also what customer experience is. So therefore, the two are in some sense the same.

Now, that's what we would have liked to have said. But now again, I mean, we are usability people. And one of the basic usability rules is you've got to design for the way people are, not the way you would hope or like people to be. So like if people don't read instructions, don't say it would be better if users would read the instructions. No, it's fine interface that can be used without reading a lot of instructions, right? And the same is here. We might say we would like people,

to think of user experience in the way that we originally conceived of it. But if that's not how the word is being used, well, that's a basic principle of linguistics is that the people define the language. So if people speak in a certain way, that's the language. And therefore, if UX is being used in a somewhat more narrow way than we intended, I don't like it. It's vocabulary inflation to have a new word for the same thing. But

That's how it is. And so therefore, we actually do also, even Niels Norman Group now, use the word CX to describe kind of a longer term relationship and UX to describe more of the shorter term use of a specific product. So, you know, these words do change a little bit over time. And that's not, in my opinion, a good idea, but that's the empirical fact of the world. So we've got to accept that.

Yeah, change over time with language is an unrefutable and sometimes unfortunate reality. And change, I guess it's fascinating to me to think about when you started this company in 1998, how the internet and not just internet, just technology in general, how it was then versus 2020, where we are now.

So what would you say you think the biggest difference is between 1998 and 2020 in terms of how the world looks at design and creating these new technologies? I mean, I feel that our field has become much more accepted and much more accessible.

thought of as being important and crucial to the world economy. Also, the quality of design really has gone up a lot. I mean, now we are never satisfied. We can always find ways in which design can get even better. There is no perfect user interface. I've always said that. And we still don't have it. There isn't? No, we still don't have the perfect user interface. There's still usability problems. Even with the new software, it's not perfect. But

Compared to how it was in 98, it's honestly much better. Websites were terrible back then. They really, really were terrible. And that was why we had a lot of early success in the company because we were able to go out and help the early clients double their business with almost no work because it was fast.

It was so bad that it was easy to get better, right? And nowadays, design is better, which means that it's harder to get even better. And so in that sense, UX has to become more sophisticated. We have to do more advanced methods, study users more deeply than we used to do in the past.

But also, it's just gotten much bigger. I mean, we have people come to our conference from so many different companies. It's not just the technology business or the e-commerce or .com as it was called back then, the .com bubble kind of companies. It's much broader. It's really much more accepted, I would say. It still needs to be

be more accepted yet and more widely used yet than it is now. But we have really come a very, very long way during the time that we have had this company.

Yes, I totally agree as someone being both a spectator and also now part of this company. And in a way, it's nice thinking about the job security, knowing that there is no perfect interface. And there's also some comfort in knowing even if we're dealt the most challenging project to work on,

in a way, if it's horrible, that only bodes well for the future. So on the topic of the future, and I guess as a parting question, I would love to know, since NNG is celebrating its 22nd anniversary by the time this podcast airs, which is very exciting, what are you most looking forward to in NNG's 23rd year?

Well, I think there's many things that are exciting and there are definitely interesting, exciting technologies that are coming out. And we have a lot of more use of video than we ever had. We didn't have any video really in the early days. And now it's very big and we have communication technologies and so forth. And that's all I think is very exciting. And also artificial intelligence will become more ingrained in how we do user interfaces.

But all that said, honestly, UX is about people. It's not about technology. So what I'm truly the most excited about actually is really hugely more internationalization of our field. UX is not just something for a few rich countries or a few of the most high-tech countries anymore.

It's almost truly worldwide. There's still a few places lagging maybe, but at our conference we have had this year people from 73 different countries participating in the conference. So that really brought awareness.

And I would expect that we would get up to 100 countries, maybe not next year, but pretty soon anyway, because it's growing. It's really being spread out. And that is one of our main missions, really, is to take UX to the world and get it that widely used. And I can see it happening. I've been fighting for this for, well, the 22 years of Nielsen Norman Group and actually for another 10 years before then. And seeing it happen is very gratifying for me. But that said...

there's still more to come. And that's what I think is the excitement for next year is that huge broad broadening of our outreach.

Absolutely. UX is people and UX is for everyone. And honestly, that would be my two parting words to capture the passion that I know you have and that I think all of us at NNG are excited to carry with us as well. Well, with that, thank you, Jacob. It has been an absolute pleasure to have you on our show. And I'm looking forward to making many more episodes with you and with our team. Definitely. Thank you, Cerise.

Thanks so much for listening to our very first episode of the NNG UX podcast. Join us every month for other interviews with NNG experts and UX thought leaders as we tackle common industry questions, pressing UX topics, and of course, the power of having a truly great user experience. If you like what you hear and want to support the work that we do, please hit subscribe on the podcast platform of your choice.

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See you next time. And remember, keep it simple.