By far the easiest (and probably most over-cited, please forgive me) to distinguish these two comes on lauded usability expert Jakob Nielsen's homepage, useit.com. Jakob has dedicated a lifetime to the study of usability, and his website represents a page that is extremely easy to interact with. Everything is front and center, easily searchable, with important ideas stressed through bold text. Yet despite its high level of usability, the lack of interesting layout, design, or even typography makes the site rather boring and feel uninspired. I can accomplish my goals here easily, but I probably won't have much fun in the process.
Usable for certain.
A nice write up and examples on how usability differs from user experience. That said, while these are 2 different professional disciplines, keep in mind that users don't make a difference. They enjoy or don't enjoy using your site and that's really the end result a product manager will strive for.
There are some wonderful, wonderful sites with extremely boring layout. They usually get their boringness from looking like someone coded the HTML in 1994, got it the way they liked it, and focused on content for the next 16 years.
The other design aesthetic from that era was WIRED magazine, which had the unboringest page layout with virtually unreadable layers of color and stripes and all kinds of what-not, and interesting text to go with it.
One person's "boring" is another person's "spare, simple, minimalist, uncluttered". Depends what you are trying to accomplish with your efforts and who you need to have smile when they look at the site.
Posted by: Edward Vielmetti | 01/26/2010 at 09:28 PM