Thursday, June 7, 2018

UI vs. UX vs. CX

At first, it may seem a good thing that user experience (UX) has become a popular trend - if done well, there is the potential to make significant improvements to a broad range of products and services that are currently rather inadequate and unsatisfying.    The problem is, it's not being done well, which not only makes things worse instead of better, but threatens to discredit the legitimate practice.

The problem that occurs when UX becomes trendy is that people who don't understand it attempt to do it, without actually learning anything about it, and the results are tragic.   This may be an individual practitioner who wishes to add a trendy new acronym to his resume without having any training or credentials, or a department manager who insists that his people can take on this task, even though they lack knowledge and credentials.

What facilitates this hubris is that UX is so poorly described - its nothing new, but an attempt to mash together two distinctly different disciplines:  user interface design (UI) and customer experience management (CX).  The first is concerned with usability (can a person use software on a computer or mobile device) and the second is concerned with usefulness (does a customer derive value from interacting with an organization).   

The relatively new field, or fad, of UX ttempts to encompass both - such that practitioners who have expertise in one area attempt to do the other.  The result is a compromise that leaves one of the two tasks sorely neglected: a person with a marketing background who knows a few tricks in Photoshop feels he can also do the design work, or a designer who can kludge together a survey feels he can do market research – so with an ample supply of narcissism and hubris, each believes he can do the others’ job as well or better than a bona fide expert.    Like stewardesses who think that their extensive flight experience makes them qualified to fly the plane.

That said, the guilt is not always with the employee, and is very often on the side of the employer.  I have been in contact with several UI practitioners who feel they are being forced into the UX space by their employers - who, without providing any instruction or resources, expect someone with an art-school degree to do marketing work ... or else.  So it's also true to say that, in their greed, firms wish to save the salary of a pilot by ordering the cabin crew into the cockpit.  

Whether they just wish to be trendy or have a desire to find a competitive advantage in saturated markets without making significant investment, they have forgotten the lessons taught by Adam Smith a few centuries ago, or Xenophon a few millennia before that, about the division and specialization of labor.   

Ironically, the lesson has only recently been remembered, or re-rembered, by IT departments, who are slowly recognizing that the generalist "unicorns" have burdened their systems with mountains of amateurish, inefficient, and poorly written code that will take many years and dollars for specialists to clean up.  So perhaps this delusion has simply migrated to the design/marketing wing, and one can expect it will drift elsewhere when that discipline finally comes to its senses.  

But while inefficient code can lurk for decades in the back-end systems, causing relatively minor problems that frustrate system users who are mostly employees, an ill-conceived experience is thrown directly into the faces of the customers - who have little tolerance for sloppy and inefficient service, and who are for most organizations the chief source of revenue.    The results of a poor UX are far more damaging, and potentially devastating to the firm.  







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