Experience vs Usability

Experience Economy is hot. No one will deny this. Companies/brands have woken up to the idea that you have to sell a complete product, and that includes the message you send to your prospective clients via all your communication channels. This whole idea of the Experience Economy has been translated to online services too, but at the cost of usability. What used to be a site with bad usability a few years ago (think flash, intro music, movie or all of the above), has become a site that “engages”. To illustrate my point, here is the infamous Southwest Airlines homepage, undoubtedly designed somewhere in the 1990′s:

Now, lets take a look at a more recent example:

That is the Korean McDonald’s site, made in 2007. See the similarities? The only major difference is that the Southwest Airlines site doesn’t have annoying music playing, in all probability making it more usable. For more comments (sorry, in dutch) about the McDonalds site, head over to Marketing Facts.

I guess it boils down to the fact that making a very interactive site isn’t always preferable nor usable and that adding sounds and movies isn’t necessarily helping you spread your message. Equipping your site with every design metaphor you can conjure up is not a good idea and we should know this by now. Playing sound in the background might seem like a good idea but the fact remains that it is obtrusive and rude.

To make matters worse, products like Papervision3D, Silverlight and Flash are encouraging such designs. While these technologies surely have a place online, we should be careful not to fall back on them every time we need a site that engages the visitor.

Tags: ui, interaction, usability, experience