Customer Experience vs User Experience

Well, the government has spoken and there is a difference between user experience and customer experience after all.

According to the Office of Citizen Services and Innovative Technologies:

"User Experience (UX) deals with people interacting with your product and the experience they receive from that interaction. UX is measured with metrics like: success rate, error rate, abandonment rate, time to complete task, and (since we deal in digital) clicks to completion.

Customer Experience (CX), in contrast, encompasses all the interactions a person has with your brand. It might be measured in: overall experience, likelihood to continue use, and likelihood to recommend to others. In essence, UX is part of a broader CX, but CX contains some aspects outside of a product that UX does not."

At our recent Magic Software Users Conference 2015, Eric Overfield of PixelMill presented on the subject of user experience. Eric brought an experienced perspective that has seen design trends come and go. His discussion on “The Thumb Zone” was particularly interesting to a number of Magic developers who quite frankly admitted that they were still designing for mobile with a “mouse and keyboard” mindset.

As discussed in the usabilla blog, left handed and right handed thumb zones are a mirror of one another. In some ways, the thumb zone is problematic because it falls smack dab in the middle of the screen where the eye naturally wants to see content, not icons. There is a natural conflict between designing for the center of interest vs the thumb zone. For this reason, I believe a good design will often allow primary content to fill the center of the screen after an icon in the thumb zone has been selected. The icons that remain relevant may then need to be positioned in the “stretch” zone of the thumb so as to allow the eye to settle in on content that uses the center of the screen.

Good mobile design is essential to mobile customer experiences that help transform business processes in a positive way. Whether software is a part of your business or software is your business, designing apps that engage customers and enhance customer experiences are essential to business process success.

Magic User Conference

The Magic Software Users Conference 2015 held in Huntington Beach, California, USA from May 31- June 3, 2015 was a great opportunity to learn about Magic Software technology, network with other Magic users and enjoy a great Southern California Beach Resort destination.



The conference began Sunday Night with a "Spice IT Up" themed Latin America welcome reception for Magic Software Users from 11 countries. This gathering time allowed longtime members of the Magic community to catch up and to meet the many new customers who were participating this year as well.



Monday's general sessions were very well received with a Roadmap Presentation by Ami Ries, VP R&D and QC for Magic Software Enterprises, Ltd. He was joined by Magic xpa Product Manager Eyal Rozenberg who unveiled "the Power of 3" in the newly released version of Magic xpa 3.0. With the general availability of Magic xpa 3.0 on May 12, the conference was perfectly timed to bring fresh capabilities and new information to developers. Not the least among the new features in Magic xpa 3.0 is the In-Memory Data Grid and In Memory Messaging Layer. Ami Ries also led a high level session on In Memory Computing that was relevant for both Magic xpi and Magic xpa users. The conference general sessions included an excellent presentation on User Experience and GUI Design Standards by Eric Overfield of Pixelmill. Numerous conference attendees commented on how much they appreciated having an outside expert on GUI design participate in the conference. The group also heard from David Schwartz, President of ABI on the topic "Magic and My Success." His presentation highlighted the development and evolution of the ABI Mastermind system which supports more than a million employees working at venues across the United States and Canada and supporting more than half of all major league hockey, basketball, baseball and football stadiums and arenas.



Tuesday's sessions took place in four tracks: Application Development, Enterprise Mobility, Enterprise Integration and a CIO and Executive Forum track.  The themes started on the first day continued into the tracks with more in-depth in-memory computing sessions in the Magic xpi and Magic xpa tracks. An in-depth GUI design standards workshop also was conducted with Eric Overfield of PixelMill and Magic developer Vova Haimov.



Other highlights included Bobby Culbertson of Superior Industries discussing integration with the Force.com platform used by Salesforce.com and sessions on JSON integration and PDF generation using Magic xpi Integration Platform's XSLT adapter.



Developer Experience was also on the agenda with a great introduction to the use of Visual Studio form editor in Magic xpa 3.0 by Product Manager Eyal Rozenberg. Magic developers took full advantage of the opportunities for 1:1 meetings with Magic employees and one another, all scheduled by the helpful Magic staff at the registration desk.



Ideas are already being gathered for next year's conference. Please contact Glenn Johnson at gjohnson@magicsoftware.com to propose a speaking session or provide any other input for 2016.