CX, UX and UI: what are they and how do they differentiate?
What is the difference between Customer Experience, User Experience and User Interface? What do all of them have in common?
Sometimes it may seem hard to find a definition where the difference between the terms Customer Experience (CX), User Experience (UX) and User Interface (UI) is clear. In this article we will explain the meaning of each one of them and how they relate to one another.
Customer Experience (CX)
Customer Experience is the impression your clients have of your brand throughout all the phases that take place during the buying cycle. The buying cycle can be compiled within the term AIDA, which stands for “attention”, “interest”, “decision” and “action”.
This is the process of optimizing the customer experience on every touch point before, during and after conversion. CX is key, because clients develop their product and service perception through all the touch points and channels the business provides.
A good client experience is vital so that your business keeps growing, since it promotes loyalty and helps retain clients.
To accurately measure customer experience we can analyze the results of customer satisfaction surveys.
User Experience (UX)
The UX definition that the ergonomics of human-system interaction standard (ISO 9241–210) determines UX as “perceptions and answers resulting from the use or anticipated use of a product, system or service”.
UX includes every emotion, beliefs, preferences, perceptions, physical and psychological answers, behaviors and achievements of the users that take place before, during and after use.
When designing digital products we should not just think about the aesthetics of the product (which are also important), but in which way we can achieve that what we are designing is appropriately communicating the value proposition of our product and that the experience is easy for the users.
User Interface (UI)
UI is the view or screen that allows a user to interact correctly with a digital product, and concerns everything which the users interact directly with.
While designing interfaces we must try to meet functionality and ease of use. We will achieve this thanks to information architecture, visual elements, colors and fonts, buttons, interaction patterns or even notification sounds.
The job of a UI Designer is to visually compose how the interface of a digital product will be so that it is paired with UX and CX.
How CX, UX and UI are related
UI is part of the UX and UX is part of the CX.
CX is the relationship between the client and the organization, being the organization the product or service (or both) and the global experience with the brand. On the other hand, UX works specifically with the experience that users have while interacting with a digital product, and UI works so that this digital product meets all the UX’s expectations.
Let’s imagine that we have to buy a plane ticket with X company. In this case, the customer experience (CX) involves every single contact the client has had with the brand, from the purchase of the ticket through any of the possible alternatives, to the interactions with the flight attendants during the flight or the Customer Service staff. However, user experience (UX) focuses on the experience that results specifically from the digital product , which in this case would be the website or the app available for the online purchase of the tickets.
CX depends on UX and vice versa. It is crucial that we work both experiences together to accomplish success, since it would not be ideal that a company had a good UX but a bad overall CX, or the other way around (good CX and bad UX).
These concepts may seem confusing or diffuse, but it is vital to understand what each of them means so we can work them out deeply. In conclusion, we may say that all three of the concepts are related, that CX is the most extensive, that UX is in charge of complete experiences involving digital products and that UI is a creation process of the digital product itself.
This article is a translation of the following one published on our corporate website:
