Usability: Visceral and behavioral emotional response

This is a great quote on usability from Whitney Hess‘s recent article on Mashable. She’s actually defining usability in reverse … by saying what it is is not:

David Malouf, professor of interaction design at Savannah College of Art & Design, explains that “while usability is important, its focus on efficiency and effectiveness seems to blur the other important factors in UX, which include learnability and visceral and behavioral emotional responses to the products and services we use.”

I like that:

• usability (including efficiency and effectiveness)
• learnability
• visceral and behavioral emotional responses

It includes a lot of overlap from my recent post, User-friendly: how to know your software is usable. Satisfaction however, which is the work I used in that post, is a pale reflection of “visceral and behavioral emotional response.”

The one thing I’d add: there are a lot of visceral emotional responses that Are Not Positive. (Using some features in Windows come to mind here, unpleasantly.)

Creating a user experience that people love and want to share … now that’s money.