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.