Usability, Conveniency, Pleasurability — The Three Parameters UX Design Actually Works With

In the previous post, we saw that the UX pyramid is made up of six attributes that together form the user experience — functionality, reliability, usability, conveniency, pleasurability, and meaningfulness — and that the area UX design can actually work with is the three in the middle tier: usability, conveniency, and pleasurability. Now let’s take a closer look at each of these three parameters.

The Three Parameters That Design the User Experience

First, usability. As mentioned earlier, usability is classified as an objective attribute that can be quantified. What usability measures is the number of steps a task requires and their complexity — the cognitive procedure a user has to go through to accomplish a given function. More specifically, it looks at how many steps (depth) or how many tasks are involved in the cognitive process of performing a function, and whether the cognitive resources invested are proportionate to the utility that function provides. Thanks to these characteristics, usability has the advantage of being relatively straightforward to quantify.

For instance, imagine a hypothetical service where sending a direct message (DM) requires six steps: “go to Home” > “tap the DM icon” > “write a message” > “choose a recipient” > “tap send” > “confirm.” Judging whether these six steps are excessive or reasonable relative to the utility of the “send a DM” function is precisely the domain of usability.

If usability is a question of “how many steps must be taken,” the next parameter, conveniency, is a question of “how natural those steps feel.” Conveniency is a subjective, qualitative attribute that refers to the degree to which a user can perform a function with ease. On the surface it’s easy to confuse with usability, but a closer look reveals a clear distinction.

Let’s take a concrete example to understand the difference. When we look for a “save” function, we usually look first under a category like “File,” because “save” and “file” are conceptually related and are conventionally grouped together. This structure aligns with the user’s existing experience and cognitive expectations. If “save” instead belonged under “Tools” or “Edit,” users would struggle to find and perform the function. Even though the number of steps remains identical, the cognitive burden a user feels at each step changes entirely.

Conveniency, then, is a metric closer to how well structure and placement align with user expectations — in other words, how easy something is to understand. Even with the same number of steps, high conveniency makes users feel that something is “easy,” while low conveniency makes them feel it is “complicated.”

The last parameter, pleasurability, is the emotional satisfaction a user feels through the design — not far removed from the aesthetic value we typically associate with design. Visual beauty, the delight felt in an interaction, the emotional tone conveyed by a brand — all of this falls within this domain. Being positioned at the top of the pyramid among the three parameters, it is the most difficult attribute to work with, yet, interestingly, it is also the one most closely related to what designers have fundamentally done for centuries — the formative work of creating beauty and evoking emotion — which is why it is often achieved relatively easily.

There is, however, one caveat worth noting here. Experience unfolds across time and space, and is formed through the integration of cognitive processes. No matter how beautiful a single screen may be, if it feels out of place within the overall flow of use or disconnected from what comes before and after, it can actually damage the user’s emotional experience. This is why, in this kind of emotional work, it is necessary to look closely not only at the completeness of individual elements but also at the process of their integration, and to carefully manage the user’s entire journey as a single, continuous emotional flow.

Putting all of this together, UX design can be defined as the work of properly adjusting these three parameters to fit the intended experience. One thing worth noting here is that two of the three — conveniency and pleasurability — are subjective values.

Because users differ in the depth of their experience, cultural background, taste, and preferences, conveniency and pleasurability can be interpreted in completely different ways depending on how we define our users. What feels intuitive to one person may feel unfamiliar to another; what one person finds beautiful, another may find uncomfortable.

Ultimately, “properly adjusting” these parameters is not a matter of finding a universal right answer, but a contextual judgment premised on a deep understanding of a specific group of users. This is precisely why, earlier in this series, when we declared what UX design is, we emphasized the deep dive into the user. Only by understanding users — not from the consumer’s perspective covered in market research, but from a more qualitative, in-depth perspective as the actual users of a product — can we design and establish a genuinely meaningful user experience.

Manipulating the Parameters to Fit a Goal

There is a trap that’s easy to fall into at this point. Statements like “fewer steps means higher efficiency,” “making something intuitive makes it convenient,” and “clean and simple means beautiful” are all true in isolation. But if you try to maximize all three metrics simultaneously, or search for some ideal direction that satisfies every user, you risk losing sight of your goal and actually ruining the user experience. This is because trade-offs inevitably exist among the parameters — raising one frequently lowers another.

Let’s take a concrete example. Some users may find the action of shaking a mobile device familiar and feel that it shortens the process, while others may not even think of shaking as a way to operate the device, and end up struggling far more than they would with an explicit, longer sequence of steps. A choice made to increase usability ends up decreasing conveniency instead.

Similarly, some users may feel a sense of simplicity and aesthetic pleasure from an interface organized with icons alone, while others may feel frustrated because, without text labels, they cannot tell what each icon means. In this case, a choice made to increase pleasurability undermines conveniency instead. This is why finding the right balance among the three parameters matters, and the answer ultimately depends on which users and which experience we are aiming for.

User experience is not something that can simply be calculated in numbers. Consider, for example, the recent shift in how cars handle gear shifting — from a physical lever to a dial or a set of buttons. Dial- or button-based controls save space and simplify the operating steps, but for drivers long accustomed to operating a lever, they can feel unfamiliar and unsettling instead. The same change can be an improvement in usability for one person, and a step backward in conveniency for another.

Thinking about this a bit more deeply, every individual user carries their own prior experience, values, preferences, and level of digital literacy. These personal contexts combine to shape how a person perceives and evaluates a new product or service. This is why, looking at the very same interface, one person might feel it is “intuitive” while another feels it is “unfamiliar.”

The role of UX design is precisely this: to pick out and make visible a target user group from among this diversity of users, to understand their experiences, values, and preferences in depth, and, on that foundation, to properly adjust and present the parameters of the user experience so as to realize the intended experience.

In practical terms, this looks something like the following: within a complex web of intertwined functions, placing enough cognitive cues for users to feel that something is “intuitive” alongside the utility each individual function provides, blending in an overall sense of aesthetics, and offering a fitting reward — the function itself — in return for the effort the user invests. At the same time, making sure the process of use never jars or breaks at any single point, but instead flows as a consistent emotional journey from beginning to end that delivers the intended experiential value — these, most likely, are the standards by which good UX design should be judged.

So far, we have looked at the three parameters of UX design and discussed how to adjust them. But it’s worth taking one more step here and asking a fundamental question: where, ultimately, do these three parameters — usability, conveniency, and pleasurability — get decided? Judging whether the number of steps is appropriate, whether the structure is intuitive, whether the aesthetics fit, is not something that happens on the pixels of a screen, but ultimately inside the mind of the user receiving it. No matter how precisely a designer adjusts these parameters, if they don’t understand how that adjustment is processed within the user’s cognition, the adjustment can only rely on baseless intuition.

Adjusting these parameters means intervening in the user’s cognition, and this is why understanding the principles by which that cognition operates becomes an essential competency for a UX designer. In the next post, we will step into the structure of cognition itself and look at what actually happens inside the user’s mind.