Shift In Focus From UX To CX

The increasing complexity of IT operations--and the need to simplify those operations--have over the last few years led to a focus on user experience, or UX, in software and application development and deployment in a bid to take technology out of the hands of expensive administrators and engineers and move it to more general users.

The last couple years, however, have seen a rise in interest for customer experience, or CX. Unlike user experience, which focuses on how an individual user uses a product or service, customer experience looks at how to make technology more easily available and easily used by customers. This is a key distinction, given that a business' customers will in general be less sophisticated users than that business' own users, and have the option of not using the product or service, and so will require as simple and interesting an experience using it than an employer's captive users.

CX came to the forefront in 2019, particularly with several acquisitions of channel partners and design firms with CX expertise. In 2020, watch for CX to come to the forefront of nearly every IT purchasing decision given how the ability to engage--and keep engaging over time--customers in an increasingly complicated world becomes a good old-fashioned obsession.