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.

The Select Window Component: Addressing the Difference Between Desktop and Mobile Contexts

As is often the case with new technology, we mimic old ways of doing things until we figure out that the new technology is best suited to new ways of working. Case in point, I am writing a blog to communicate with you now when a video would be more effective.

Experienced developers sometimes suffer a disadvantage because these old ways of doing things creep up in new paradigms as old and freshly irrelevant patterns. Such is the case in the numerous differences in best practice between mobile user interfaces and the traditional GUI interaction in desktop software.

With the announcement of Magic xpa Application Platform 2.5, a new Mobile Application Framework was introduced by Magic Software. Let’s take a look at the Select Window Component to see how different mobile GUIs ought to be from traditional applications.

Our example app is a Time Sheet application. In a traditional application where I want to find a particular timesheet, criteria would normally be entered in a multi-field search form, a “Search” button would be pressed and the match or matches would be displayed in a list. In a large screen format this allows me to use human memory to search very specifically. When my memory is faulty, I can search more broadly and then gradually filter the results to get down the actual time sheet I want to see.

A mobile approach will be quite different. My main screen will call out the two categories that I am most likely to use to find a specific project – wither the “Customer” name or the “Project” name. So I might design an interface with just these two menu options. Each will raise an event that gives me more choices.

If I select Customers, I get a list of my Local Customers.

If I select Projects, I get a list of Local Projects.

But if I select customer, and then click on the customer name in the list. I automatically get a list of that Local Customer’s Local projects.

In this example, the projects are simply named by month. Selecting a specific project will then show me the Customer Name, Project Name and my Time Sheets for that project.

To edit a given time sheet, once again I simply select it (by sliding or touching). Setting the time in the report uses features that are “native” or normal for my type of device (Android, Apple, Windows Mobile, etc.) 

The result of setting the new time is a corrected or updated Time Sheet as seen below.

So the flow of the app is something like this:

That is not to say that the old approach wouldn’t work. But good mobile apps strive to leverage the users time and limit typing and button pressing as much as possible. What the user sacrifices in flexibility, they gain ten times in efficiency and overall ease-of-use. 

Metro UI Debate: Planned Obsolescence Ahead

With all the debate suddenly surrounding the Metro design spec introduced by Microsoft as part of Windows 8, one cannot help but wonder whose PR department is whipping up the controversy: Apple’s or Microsoft’s? On the one hand, the discussion can be viewed as an attack on Microsoft by the Apple Dumping Gang while on the other hand it could be a “no publicity is bad publicity” ploy by the MSFT Gang That Can Only Design Straight. In my view the attention ends up helping Microsoft and Android while hurting Apple.

The differences in the UI design and interactivity standards are rather ironic. Microsoft has generated literally billions of dollars in revenue by releasing successive generations of its operating systems and driving their adoption by pushing user expectations towards increasingly complex and interactive design standards. Early windows design looked very gray, gradually became more colorful, then beveled, then shaded, then ray traced, then transparent, then animated. Each time the clear intent was to create a graphical case for the latest coolest operating system version and a feeling that applications using the older design standards were passé. It was plainly and simply a form of planned obsolescence little different from design trends in the fashion, automotive and consumer packaged goods industries.

With mobile devices, Microsoft correctly identified a conundrum. If you bring today’s highly sophisticated desktop design standards over to mobile devices then there isn’t really much of a look and feel upgrade path left. Planned obsolescence becomes difficult when your design trends have reached their logical plateau. And this plateau was evident on the desktop as well. The solution: bring the desktop and mobile UI standards down together to a simpler level and yet one which is so clean and crisp as to feel modern and chic.

Metro is not nearly as bad as most of its critics make it out to be. Sure, it is simple. But there are plenty of Swedish designers who will tell you that design simplicity is a value to be upheld. If you think they are wrong, take a visit to your local IKEA store. I disagree that Metro is classic or retro in any way, it is quintessentially modern and sleek. In this sense, I do not disagree that Metro is a workable and pleasant design and interface standard. Whether or not it is a superior standard is a bit of a subjective argument in my view. I disagree with the Metro advocates who suggest that it is the only effective GUI. It is an effective GUI and it can beat chaos design in side-by-side comparison tests. So what? Is Microsoft really going to enforce Metro UI principles with police-state like efficiency? No. As a result, design creep and chaos will eventually eliminate the consistency that is currently Metro’s primary advantage in UI metric comparisons. Once you eliminate its newness and therefore its consistency, the Metro UI will compare similarly to any other well conceived GUI.

Call me a cynic on this one, but I see the graphical aspects of Metro as a well-designed platform for planned obsolescence. Time will tell. In the meantime, designing apps for any platform, any device, any time leads me to Magic.