User Experience or Customer Experience?

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Recently, we've explored the terms of User Experience and Customer Experience - often used interchangeably. Our UX Bootcamp coach Stephen Shaw explained why it's crucial not to mix the two up in MadeFor's Free Taster session.

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Organisations need digitally skilled talent rather sooner than later, and the impact your digital products and services have on your overall customer experience is huge.

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Why UX?

First things first, why should you start growing your User Experience capability? Long answer short: because the world is changing. Organisations need digitally skilled talent rather sooner than later, and the impact your digital products and services have on your overall customer experience is huge. And if organisations need more talent, that means professionals have an opportunity to upskill or reskill into a job with high demand in the job market.

During the session we've looked at some stats that supported this:

• 50% of all employees need reskilling to support digitised working processes. (WEF's Future of Jobs report 2020)
• The growth in demand for UX designers will be 18% in the ten years starting from 2015. (CNN Money)
• There will be a 3% year-on-year growth (through 2028) in demand for industrial UX designers. (The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics)

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Secondly, and probably most importantly - User Experience skills can be utilised in many different roles. We've welcomed developers, marketeers, graphic designers and project managers on our UX bootcamp. If your job is to address your customer needs and build digital products to meet them, UX design skills will help you on this journey.

User Experience or Customer Experience?

During this Free Taster, we've explored the different interpretations of Customer Experience and User Experience. And although not completely unaligned with one another, they have a different scope that is important to understand. Let's start with the basics and giving two simple definitions for each.

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"User Experience is the outcome of all interactions that a user has with a digital product."

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"Customer Experience is the outcome of all interactions that a user has with a brand."

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To explore what this looks like in real life, we've looked at an example to get a better understanding of their meaning.

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Look at the example. We're looking at the complete pre- to post-flight experience at the airport. As a customer, you interact with multiple different touchpoints, both on- and offline. Within this journey, you can see there are multiple moments where the customer interacts with digital products and or services. These touchpoints can be specifically categorised under User Experience, however they are part of the Customer Experience if we take into account the experience at the airport.

Certain brands, such as Uber have a heavier focus on the experience of their digital products as service, as other brands. But with rapidly changing times, growing a digital capability becomes vital for every business to address rapidly changing customer demands and stay competitive.

Building UX skills fast and effective

Being a great UX'er has nothing to do with knowing the jargon and how to design cool looking wireframes (unfortunately). However, being a great UX'er is knowing what the right solution for the right UX problem is, and how you can successfully drive that in your business.

To set you up for success, we work with a UX process and take you through a journey from problem to product. Each of these stages include different activities and lessons in a real-life scenario, to ensure you are able to immediately apply the skills in your daily job. You can see that each stage addresses a specific part of the UX process here:

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By resembling a real-life working scenario, participants do not only get the hard skills to do their job, but also learn the soft skills to drive success.

Experiential learning drives successful outcomes

Currently, we're spending even more time behind our screens as we did. With working from home becoming the new normal, people's zoom fatigue is really starting to kick in. That's why we want to make online learning fun, engaging, but most of all effective and useful.

We minimise our time listening and make room for testing, trialing, failing and iterating to ensure you gain practical skills with sufficient amount of information. By resembling a real-life working scenario, participants do not only get the hard skills to do their job, but also learn the soft skills to drive success. Our bootcamp participants come from various different backgrounds and have a wide variety of experience, knowledge and know-how you can learn from and interact with in our MadeFor community channels.

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Free Tasters by MadeFor.

Join free sessions to work on your Customer Experience skills, get to know the MadeFor team, and experience our approach to learning.

Whether you want to get a better understanding about a specific topic, want to know if MadeFor bootcamps are for you or if you're curious about CX in general. These Tasters are for you.

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Curious to see what the next Taster is about or want to join the Ux bootcamp right away? Click here to see the schedule.