CX & UX merge
Kim Flaherty is a Senior User Experience Specialist at Nielsen Norman Group (NN/g) where she focuses on omnichannel customer experience and customer journey management. She works as a dedicated analyst studying the space between traditional CX and UX practices. We talked about the original meaning of User Experience, how CX and UX are merging, and how that is impacting Journey Management and user-centered design operations.
Nielsen Norman Group was founded in 1998 by two UX pioneers, Don Norman and Jakob Nielsen. In 2023, Kara Pernice, who envisioned and built NN/g’s popular UX Certification program, became President and CEO to lead NN/g into the future.
Read more about the origins of UX (User Experience) and the founding story of Nielsen Norman Group in my X-Interview with Jakob Nielsen.
“ Different levels of experience.”
As somebody who’s been teaching courses about Omni Channel Experience Design, this question always comes up because they see the label CX. Our audience is primarily UX practitioners working on product teams. And they're trying to understand, well, why is that different?
To communicate the difference, I point to how these terms or ideas are typically practiced and applied in business.
The time factor that it takes because UX has evolved to be so focused on interface and product, that's where most practitioners mental model sits.
But obviously journeys have become more and more part of the conversation over the years. People do understand, OK, yes, that is another type of experience and we're not really focusing on that. We're still down here on these individual interaction experiences.
But maybe we should be thinking about the end-to-end journey and how these things come together to ultimately help drive users to complete their goals with us.
But even beyond that, a brand experience like we were talking about here, that happens over months and years sometimes, and that's at an even higher level above journeys.
“ journeys as the unit of change.”
Think of CX as being more focused on that comprehensive brand experience. Of course, through optimizing and thinking about the long-term goals that make up that brand experience.
Interaction-level is where UX is really focused right now. CX has long been thinking more globally. And journeys are in the middle.
The CX World and the UX World are both scaling toward each other with journeys being that unit of change.
I'm starting to see our common ground by the longitudinal aspect that connects them.
“ We are living in our experiences now.”
I don't walk away from my experience with my cell phone provider anymore. I'm managing my account online. I'm paying my bill online, I'm getting emails, I'm getting notifications. I'm living in it.
Whereas before, it was much more separated from us. And this new dynamic applies to every industry. Now every product you buy in your home has a smart component to it.
We are a lot more immersed in managing the world around us through the Internet and the channels that we use to interact with the companies that service these things.
I think that has helped a lot of people understand the value of this because they can relate. They can relate to feeling, Ohh, you know this should be easier. Don't they know me by now? Or you know I like the product, but the experience of managing the product in my home doesn't work for me and I'm the buyer, so that emotion impacts my buying decisions.
Subscription services are so ubiquitous now, the user is always deciding whether to continue to buy or not to buy. So, once we sell them once, we’ve got to keep selling them.