There's a lot of words in our field.
In fact, the user experience field is plagued
by vocabulary inflation replacing well-known terminology
with new words that causes miscommunication.
This can be confusing,
especially to those just getting started.
So let's play a game, rapid-fire this vs. that.
And first up we have a fun one,
user experience, UX, vs. user interface, UI.
User experience encompasses all aspects
of the end-user's interaction with the company,
its services, and its products.
This goes beyond just the look and feel of something,
but how it works.
Think load or wait times,
the information available, the functionality.
A big factor in this user experience is UI,
user interface refers to the specific visual asset
the user interacts with.
Think the look, the feel,
the interactivity of the digital product.
UI is the cosmetics of the experience,
typography, color, grid, spacing, icons, buttons.
As an example, consider a website with movie reviews.
Even if the UI for finding a film is perfect,
the UX will be poor for a user who wants information
about a small independent release if the underlying database
only contains movies from the major studios.
So let's continue this idea with UX vs CX,
meaning user experience versus customer experience.
When our founder, Don Norman, coined the term UX,
he intended for it to describe the complete experience
a user has with an organization,
But, because it was proposed in an era
when only computers existed
and our main form was digital interaction,
it's come to be associated
with the user's experience of a single touchpoint,
for example, a website or app.
Customer experience, CX, compared to UX is a newer term,
and it's used to describe the complete experience a user has
with an organization over long amounts of time
and likely many different channels.
For example, I have an iPhone, which I use every day.
This, along with my Apple TV and Apple Watch,
are just three user experiences
within my much larger customer experience with Apple.
Next up, we have UX versus service design.
At this point, I've talked a lot
about what user experience is,
it's the experience of anything the user encounters.
Service design on the other hand
is how that experience gets created.
The internal or organizational people, processes,
and technology required to make the different pieces
of the user's experience actually work.
Here's the metaphor I always use.
If you are traveling and staying at a hotel,
everything you experience from booking your room online
to arriving and checking in,
all the way to the presentation of your room,
this is your user experience.
Now, how the hotel achieves each of these pieces,
from staff-to-staff handoffs,
from updating the available rooms in the reservation system,
to your room being cleaned before you arrive,
this all is service design.
And then last but not least, UX versus usability.
Usability is a quality indicator of a user experience.
It's concerned with the functional part
of a system or product.
It's how easily you can use an interactive system.
The degree of which products are easy to learn, effective,
efficient, error-free, satisfy the user's goals.
Now, compared to UX, usability has a much narrower focus.
Can our users achieve their goal when using our product?
Similar to the terms we've discussed today,
UX and usability rely on each other,
a truly great user experience begins with usability.
Don't be worried about always using exactly the right term,
the goal is to consider all the variables
that go into superior experiences.
In the end, all of these ideas are intertwined
and necessary in order to deliver on the promises
and expectations of our end users and customers.