CX and UX: not the same thing

Source: © Denis Putilov 123rf

CX refers to the perceived experience that a customer assumes with your company. UX, on the other hand, describes an end-user’s thoughts, feelings and impressions when they go through a specific interaction.

CX vs UX

CX refers to the perceived experience that a customer assumes with your company. UX describes an end-user’s thoughts, feelings and impressions when they go through a specific interaction.

In order to understand customer attitudes and behaviours during interfacing, usability and problems thereof are key focal points in customer centricity and customer understanding.

Thus, usability testing as well as user experience evaluation are essential components of UX and further lends itself to Customer Experience Design.

Usability testing

Usability tests tend to focus on task performance whereas UX focuses on lived experiences. The main focus of evaluation methods is to help in choosing the best design and to assess if the final product meets the original UX targets.

It is evident that most of the measures are common to conventional approaches to user centred design, but three measures are specific to user experience:

1. The impact of expected UX to purchase decisions.
2. Continuous excitement.
3. Why and when the user experiences frustration?

In the context of user centred design, typical usability concerns include:

1. Designing for and evaluating overall effectiveness and efficiency.
2. Designing for and evaluating user comfort and satisfaction.
3. Designing to make the product easy to use and evaluating the product in order to identify and fix usability problems.
4. When relevant, the temporal aspect leads to a concern for learnability.

Further points of concerns regarding usability include:

1. Usability problems.
2. Task time.

UX evaluation

Many methods exist for doing traditional usability evaluations, but UX evaluation differs clearly from usability evaluation. While usability emphasises effectiveness and efficiency, UX is subject- as such, it cannot be evaluated with stopwatches and logging.

In industry, especially in product development, the main requirements for UX evaluation methods are is that they have to be lightweight (not require much resources), fast and relatively simple to use.

UX best practice

The first question that you, as a UX creator, needs to consider is whether your App is useful.The next question that needs to be asked is, “is the App or site usable?”Finally, is the app or site desirable?

Test! The process of testing is an essential one, not only when implementing a new UX design, but throughout the UX process. As technology, the customer, and user preferences evolve, so do their needs from your App and website.

Usability testing proves to be a critical step in the UX as well as the CX design processes, respectively. A well-executed, smooth running UX design will help retain customers if it proves to be useful, usable, and desirable.

Thus, running an in-app survey allows for customers to rate their experiences during and or after if takes place, with little to no interference.