I just had a look at the paper “Comfort in Using Hand Tools” and found quite interesting the different definitions authors give for the term “Comfort”:
According to Peter Vink , Comfort is “a convenience experience by the end‐user during or just after working with the product“.
Wikipedia, on the other hand, defines Usability as a term “used to denote the ease with which people can employ a particular tool or other human-made object in order to achieve a particular goal”.
To me, both of them are quite similar for several reasons:
- They have qualitative attributes;
- They are focused on the end-user;
- They look for best experience.
But curiously, the paper mentioned above just outlines “Usability” once…
The only difference I see between these two concepts could be in the “touching” experience: Comfort is a bit more narrow, more related to physical objects. Usability is a wider concept, including not only physical hardware but also digital sofware.
From now on, I think I would include Confort when talking about Usability. The term sounds human, smooth and friendly…
it makes me laugh to think about an spanish interaction designer saying: “mira que interfaz tan confortable” or “es una interfaz muy comoda”
@david :D
Just change “easy” for “comfort” in the wikipedian definition of usability:
“used to denote the comfort with which people can employ a particular tool or other human-made object in order to achieve a particular goal”.
I don´t know about you, but to me sounds better!
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