Publisher Summary No universal definition of the user experience exists. Definitions from researchers and practitioners extend all the way from examining neurological phenomena to macroeconomic behaviors. Somewhere between counting the firings of neurons and calculating profit and loss statements is a practical set of boundaries that defines what to consider in a design process. Usability is the practice of making things easy to use. It is often equated with user experience, but while bad usability can break a good product, good usability is insufficient to create a good experience. An experience can be usable without being useful or valuable to enough people to justify the expense of creating it. Any definition of the user experience has to take into account the totality of what people engaged in using a product or service consider part of their experience. This ranges from how easy the product is to use to associations they may have with the vendor selling the experience. This definition attempts to transcend ergonomic, attitudinal, and visual metrics to include all facets that an audience considers relevant to an experience. The goal is to align developers’ understanding of the role a product plays in a person’s life with how that person perceives the design of that product.