People new to Interaction Design often get confused with terms like UI, UX and CX. Many think it is all about ‘Web Designing’, hence designing colourful web pages using images and fonts.
This article is intended to explain these processes and their significance in application interface design.
UI – User Interface Design
UI design focuses on visual design or skinning the wire-frames, where the creative designer plays with colours, shapes, layouts, typography and more. It is related to branding, colours, typography, iconography. The design team refers all these branding related aspects from a brand guidelines document.
A digital first brand OR a brand looking at aggressive digital transformation should focus on a separate dedicated online brand guidelines document.
User Interface Design is all about what the customer sees & feels while interacting with the design. From Left brain Right brain theory, UI is more Right brain, a work related to emotions, creativity, intuitiveness, imagination and free flow.
UX – User Experience Design
User Experience Design starts with research followed by analysis and strategy. It is all about finding solutions, documentation, dealing with Information Architecture, Data, Wireframes, Prototyping, Decision making & similar logical attributes.
It defines the structure of the product, funnels, scenarios, data flow & development plan for development team to use while defining the development sprints.
User Experience is all about how the customer thinks & acts to complete the goal or tasks while using the application. From Left brain Right brain theory perspective, UX is more Left brain, a work related to Logic, Reason, structure, linear and functionality
CX – Customer Experience Design
Customer Experience in digital context is everything the user uses and experiences during interacting with brand’s digital assets.
It may start with a digital communication in form of a CTA (Call to action) on a mailer or digital advertise or a post on social media. It could be a task initiated on a self serving portal or a interactive funnel designed to take some action like purchase or booking. It could be as simple as raising a service request or submitting a complaint or locating a toll free contact number!
How pleasing and easy the interaction with the digital asset happens defines the quality of customer experience.
Effectively UI + UX + Data + Advertising + Branding + Sales process + Business strategy + Pricing + After sales service + Support and other things result in effective CX (Customer Experience).
A good Customer Experience is a result of balance of Creativity (Right Brain) and Logic (Left brain) applied during application design. The balanced approach results in appealing and effective customer experience which results in acquisition, retention and revenue generation.
In a SMART application definition, A stands for Attractive & Accessible which is nothing but building a balanced user interface and experience.
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Understanding UI (User Interface), UX (User Experience) & CX (Customer Experience) from Atalbihari Baddar
By, Atalbihari Baddar