CX Design Vs. UX Design – The Basic Differences

User experience is a crucial cog of how popular a product is, whether digital or physical. There are many ways in which user experience has evolved for user experience designers and the user base that it serves. Apart from user experience, another term has been making rounds in the app design circuit. The new term is customer experience design. While at first, user experience design and customer experience design sounds like the same thing, a good UX design agency will tell you that customer experience is different from the user experience.

The Minute Differences Between UX Design And CX Design

The differences may be minute, but they are there. Professional consultants that provide UX design services are starting to understand and establish the differences between UX and CX design. While companies have started to focus on UX design and functionalities, they have also started focusing on CX design for consistent success over the next years. Both the areas focus on developing on experience that people get from the products.

Before going into the differences between UX design and CX design, let us look at UX and CX design’s basic definitions and impact.

What Is UX Design?

The term UX design means user experience design which focuses on how a user interacts with a specific product or service. The product can be a mobile app, website or software that users use every day. These products work through user commands, so an experience comes forth from their use. The effort to amplify the experience from interaction with the product is user experience services. The design of the product and the integration of common functions into the product framework contribute a lot to the final user experience.

A UX design team has to focus on creating a user interface with a very calculated and analyzed approach. Whether the product is a physical one or a digital one, the UX design team focuses on creating a user interface that enhances the product’s usability so that the user associates a lot of value with the product.

In the UX design areas, the many features of a product that the team focuses on are navigation, learning curve, information architecture and visual impact on the user. The user is the receiver of the experience. Thus, user data and insights are analyzed to create UX design.

What Is CX Design?

While the scope area of a user experience design consultant is much more restricted, the area of operations for a CX design consultant is greater. Customer experience covers a wider area when it comes to the experience it represents. Customer experience maps all the interactions that a company’s customer has with a brand or company. The experience does not just focus on a singular product. The company might have more than one product line, and customer experience relates to all of them. The different processes inside a company that have an impact on customers and that foster customer-brand interaction are also part of the customer experience design sphere. In a way, user experience design is a subset of customer experience design.

Various companies take the help of CX design tips to assess and improve the way they interact with their customer. CX deals with the larger picture of how a customer responds to the organization’s different marketing strategies. The CX designer considers the brand reputability and customer service before creating a flow for customer experience processes inside the company. The CX designer also focuses on product usability and even the general sales process involved in acquiring new customers.

The Responsibilities Differ

User experience designers focus on the usability and overall user experience that arises from a singular product. On the other hand, a customer experience designer focuses on multiple spheres of customer interactions and how customers feel when they connect with the brand. In a way, customer experience is more closely linked with the brand image and perception of a company. The customer experience designer focuses highly on the processes involved behind the scene in catering to customers.

While customer experience designers focus only on the company’s customer base, the UX designer does not necessarily focus on customers. The user experience consultant focuses on the user segment, including people who are not connected with the brand. The UX designer focuses on the usability of a certain product, while the CX designer focuses on the journey that the user takes up to convert into a customer.

While UX designers focus on defining the individual user persona, a customer designer focuses on defining the customer base and what keeps it constant. The UX designer focuses on surveying individuals or smaller user groups while customer experience designers survey and research larger user bases to understand sales’ broader mentality.

While UX designers focus more on improving the usability of a certain digital or non-digital product, the customer experience designer focuses on formulating strategies and product perception to increase customer loyalty to the brand and its products.

The Metrics Differ

The metrics that the two designer groups measure their success on differ greatly. For example, UX designers often measure the usability of a product and use user feedback to know the success of the product. However, CX designers take the metrics of churn rate, retention rate, and customer lifetime value to know the success of their CX design strategy. The metrics used by CX designers determine how well the customers are responding to the products and strategies deployed by the company.

The metrics are employed to measure the customer satisfaction and loyalty that customers extend toward the company. The customer experience designer also periodically analyses the number of customers gained or lost by the company to suggest improvements in customer-oriented products and services.

As companies now move towards a more customer-oriented organizational workflow model, there is ample scope for designers to go into UX or CX. User experience and customer experience are connected, but they are not the same. However, UX designers and CX designers must collaborate on multiple projects for companies that keep customers first.