User experience design expert, Jacques Oberholzer, shares his insights on UX and how businesses are dealing with today's digitally savvy customers. Jacques and show host, Julia, discuss the evolution of the field of user experience, the relationship between UX and CX and the latest trends in digital customer experiences. If you’re looking to stay abreast of the latest trends, capabilities and what's on the horizon with digital customer experiences, then this episode is for you.

UX and CX

As more and more of the customer journey moves into the digital realm, it's important for CX teams to understand what consumers are looking for in digital experiences. Fortunately, there is an entire field of UX specialists out there focusing on how to make great experiences in the digital space (and beyond - though a lot of emphasis is being placed on digital). This begs the question of how UX differs from CX, and how these two functions should most effectively collaborate.

Episode 56 explored the similarities and differences between UX and CX, and it was reassuring to hear a UX expert like Jacques corroborate the same key points. Essentially, we can think of both as functional areas that advocate for the needs of customers, but that UX tends to do this through the lens of a user's experience on a specific system, platform or touchpoint. We can think of CX as a more holistic look at a customer's overall experience, while UX zooms in on a specific subset of this.

The role of data

One of the challenges with managing experiences in the non-digital world is that we have gaps in our understanding of the customer's experience. In a traditional retail context, for example, a retailer might only gather data about the customer at the point of sale. Information about their journey through the shop before purchase is largely unknown. Granted that might change with the rise of the Internet of Things (IoT), but for now we have limited insight.

That's definitely not the case in digital space, where every click produces a data point. In our conversation, Jacques highlighted the role of data as a game changer for digital UX. Website tracking has empowered organizations and their UX experts to quickly gather insights about what customers do and don't like. It's also forced UX specialists - many who hearken from a creative background - to learn the language of quantitative analysis and to figure out how to integrate this into their understanding of customer needs. These insights can help teams develop great websites, but they also bring the voice of the customer into the conversation early and often, something that can be simultaneously helpful and frustrating.

Major UX trends on the horizon

Jacques and I discussed a number of UX trends that should be important considerations for CX professionals who want to help their organizations craft and deliver great digital experiences:

* The move to mobile - consumers are doing more and more on their mobiles. From streaming to social media, many experiences skip the desktop all together and are mostly experienced through mobile devices. This has advantages and disadvantages. From a design perspective, mobiles present limited space for visual engagement. On the upside, mobiles had additional sensory features, like motion sensors, that enable brands to deliver richer digital experiences which just aren't possible on a desktop web interface.* Hardware may drive the next wave of UX innovation - Jacques pointed out that UX innovation has prob...