Yesterday, I read this article in Fast Company, on Usability vs. Experience with regards to the design philosophies of Google and Apple. The article seemed to perpetuate a seemingly ubiquitous confusion about usability and experience, which I thought I would try to put my finger on here:

Usability vs. Experience is the wrong distinction for explaining the difference between Google and Apple’s design approaches, and a common misunderstanding, even by those who use it to explain their work. The right distinction is about what “rung” on the problem/solution ladder a particular product design is intended to address. To explain:

For any human desire, there is a hypothetical “problem-solution ladder” that can be constructed, of ends and means, that gets you from the expressed desire to its satisfaction. Products can be said to exist as means to satisfy those desires as ends.

However, companies, esp. engineering-oriented companies, generally focus too low-down on the ladder, and produce and market products that focus on the means, and forget about, or are unclear about, the ends for which those products are really used. Other companies, like Apple, have a clear eye on the ends – they have been making products to address the same ends over and over again for years, trying to perfect the achievement of the ends (that is Jobs’ vision), ends which have to do with productivity, lifestyle, personal identity, entertainment, enjoyment, connecting with people. They eschew means in two ways: 1) by making the interaction as much a direct expression of the ends as possible (e.g., surface interfaces vs. keyboard and mouse; mobile vs. at your desk), and 2) by making the means, where it must show itself, as invisible as possible, or if they must be visible, as beautiful and appealing as possible so we may love them as things in themselves and forgive them their less than human intelligence and empathy.

This explains another element of Apple’s strategy: vertically integrated innovation, from hardware, to  devices, to software, to marketing. I have not worked out the details yet, but it seems to me that the market forces that drive traditional tech companies towards modular product architectures (usually reduces costs, allow companies to focus more on core areas, get performance boosts from specialization of components, opens up new markets of innovation led by third parties that ultimately serve to enhance the value of your product) may involve making trade-offs whose severity worsens the closer you get to the specific human ends to which we put such modularized products. With every modularization comes a generalization, standardization, a loss of control, a making rigid of piece of the ‘means’ outside its purposeful context in the whole. As these trade-offs roll up the problem-solution ladder to the ultimate ends of the products for their users, they end up becoming an increasingly limiting factor on the quality of the result. This may be a version of Christensen’s modularity vs. inter-dependence hypothesis.