It's 1992. You're among the 15% of American households with a personal computer—a year before the World Wide Web would change everything. Your revolutionary machine in the form of a beige box hums like a small aircraft as it boots up. There’s no slick login screen, no intuitive graphic interface—just a few 3-bit icons and a blinking cursor waiting for commands you barely understand. Lost? Your only lifeline is the mysterious F1 key.
Back then, no one—except pioneering thinkers like Don Norman—talked about "user experience" (UX) and the term "customer experience" (CX) wouldn’t catch on until a few years later with the publishing of Lewis Carbone’s 1994 article, “Engineering Customer Experiences.” These concepts existed in our daily interactions with products and services, but for most, they remained nameless, invisible forces.
Fast forward to today. UX and CX are so deeply woven into our digital and physical lives that we only notice them when something fails—when an app crashes, when customer service puts us on eternal hold, or when technology betrays our expectations.
You might hear these terms used interchangeably or wonder about the difference. They represent distinct, yet complementary approaches to enhancing how people interact with products, services, and brands.
As organizations increasingly recognize the value of experience-driven strategies, understanding the nuances between UX and CX is crucial in designing holistic interactions that keep your customers engaged, and your company competitive.
Just this morning, you probably experienced dozens of examples of UX without even realizing it. Brewing your coffee, opening a streaming app to listen to your morning commute playlist, checking your emails—each of these moments involved interacting with a user interface.
User experience focuses on how people interact with products, applications, and digital services. The term—popularized by Don Norman in the 1990s while he was at Apple—encompasses every aspect of the end-user's interaction with a company, particularly its digital touchpoints.
The UX process typically starts with analyzing a problem. Say a company wants to boost online payments—the UX designer’s first move is to form a hypothesis and craft a problem statement, then validate those assumptions through user research.
User research includes methods like user interviews and usability testing. These tools help uncover user goals, needs, and pain points. Based on these insights, we design wireframes and build prototypes, using them to address key issues and continuously iterate on our solutions.
The scope of UX work is generally confined to specific products or platforms—the website, the mobile app, the software interface—making it a more focused discipline compared to the broader landscape of CX.
Customer Experience takes a more holistic view, encompassing every interaction a customer has with a company throughout their entire relationship. Where UX zooms in on specific digital touchpoints, CX pans out to consider the complete customer journey across all channels—both digital and physical.
CX professionals map comprehensive customer journeys, analyze touchpoints across multiple channels, and work to ensure consistency in brand experience regardless of how or where a customer engages. They focus on understanding emotional connections, brand perception, and long-term relationship building.
The broader scope of CX often involves cross-departmental collaboration, influencing areas from marketing and sales to product development and customer service.
You can think of the relationship between CX and UX as nested circles with UX forming a critical subset within the larger CX ecosystem. Every UX touchpoint contributes to the overall customer experience, but CX encompasses additional elements beyond digital interactions.
UX focuses on making an online portal or app easy to navigate, simplifying claim submissions, and making policy information clear and accessible.
CX considers all of those digital touchpoints plus the initial onboarding experience, agent interactions, clarity of communication, speed of claim resolution, billing processes, and ongoing client support.
Where they differ is in scope, breadth of touchpoints considered, and organizational positioning. UX teams often sit within product or design departments, while CX may operate as a cross-functional initiative or dedicated department with broader organizational influence.
Both UX and CX rely heavily on user research, but their approaches and focus areas differ in important ways.
UX metrics typically include task success rates, time-on-task, error rates, CTR (click-through rates), engagement rates, and usability scores like SUS (System Usability Scale).
CX metrics often include NPS (Net Promoter Score), CSAT (Customer Satisfaction), CES (Customer Effort Score), and CLV (Customer Lifetime Value).
While UX research zeroes in on specific interaction points—often in controlled settings—CX research takes a longitudinal view, tracking experiences across multiple channels and over extended periods. UX research asks the question "Can users successfully complete this task?" while CX research asks "How do customers feel about their overall relationship with our brand?”
Both UX and CX rely heavily on user research, but their approaches and focus areas differ in important ways.
UX metrics typically include task success rates, time-on-task, error rates, CTR (click-through rates), engagement rates, and usability scores like SUS (System Usability Scale).
CX metrics often include NPS (Net Promoter Score), CSAT (Customer Satisfaction), CES (Customer Effort Score), and CLV (Customer Lifetime Value).
While UX research zeroes in on specific interaction points—often in controlled settings—CX research takes a longitudinal view, tracking experiences across multiple channels and over extended periods. UX research asks the question "Can users successfully complete this task?" while CX research asks "How do customers feel about their overall relationship with our brand?”
Collaboration Point: The CX team has conducted in-depth user research and is in the process of creating journey maps, they find that various users experience pain points when creating claims from the app. UX engages with these users through user testing and learns more about specific pain points. The UX team designs and tests prototypes to address these points of friction.
Collaboration Point: A patient might schedule an appointment through an app (UX) but then experience pre-appointment communications, waiting room experience, and follow-up care (CX). The UX and CX professionals collaborate to ensure information flows smoothly between systems and that the patient feels supported throughout the integrated experience.
UX professionals typically approach problems from a design and usability perspective, focusing on removing friction and creating intuitive interfaces. CX professionals approach problems from a more holistic business perspective, considering how experiences align with brand promises and business operations across multiple touchpoints.
Effective collaboration between UX and CX teams can create powerful synergies that benefit both customers and the organization. Here are some best practices:
While UX and CX represent different scopes and approaches to experience design, they share a common goal: creating meaningful, valuable interactions that satisfy customers and drive business success. UX focuses on making specific products and digital touchpoints intuitive and efficient, while CX ensures consistency and quality across the entire customer journey.
Organizations that recognize the distinct value of both disciplines, while fostering collaboration between them, gain significant competitive advantages.
By understanding and appreciating the differences and similarities between these complementary fields, professionals from both disciplines can work more effectively together, leveraging their unique perspectives to create experiences that are both usable in the moment and meaningful over time.
The future belongs to organizations that can seamlessly integrate these disciplines, creating experiences that are not only functional but emotionally resonant across all touchpoints of the customer journey.
It's 1992. You're among the 15% of American households with a personal computer—a year before the World Wide Web would change everything. Your revolutionary machine in the form of a beige box hums like a small aircraft as it boots up. There’s no slick login screen, no intuitive graphic interface—just a few 3-bit icons and a blinking cursor waiting for commands you barely understand. Lost? Your only lifeline is the mysterious F1 key.
Back then, no one—except pioneering thinkers like Don Norman—talked about "user experience" (UX) and the term "customer experience" (CX) wouldn’t catch on until a few years later with the publishing of Lewis Carbone’s 1994 article, “Engineering Customer Experiences.” These concepts existed in our daily interactions with products and services, but for most, they remained nameless, invisible forces.
Fast forward to today. UX and CX are so deeply woven into our digital and physical lives that we only notice them when something fails—when an app crashes, when customer service puts us on eternal hold, or when technology betrays our expectations.
You might hear these terms used interchangeably or wonder about the difference. They represent distinct, yet complementary approaches to enhancing how people interact with products, services, and brands.
As organizations increasingly recognize the value of experience-driven strategies, understanding the nuances between UX and CX is crucial in designing holistic interactions that keep your customers engaged, and your company competitive.
