It wouldn't be design without a ridiculous graphic! The cheese (UI) sits within the mouse (UX) which sits within the cat (CX)

How to know the difference

CX is focused on the 'relationship level' of the customer experience, whereas UX is focused on the interaction and journey within that relationship level.

Think about your own relationship with a company over your lifetime. You might be able to define your experience with a bank, for example, across the following levels taken from the Nielsen Norman Group website:

The single-interaction level
The experience a person has across a single device in trying to perform a specific task, such as checking their bank balance

The journey level
The person’s experience of attempting to achieve a goal, sometimes across multiple platforms, channels, or devices, such as paying bills, and making changes to a monthly bill payment

The relationship level
All interactions the person has had with the company, over their lifetime, such as calls to customer service, any written correspondence, and face-to-face meetings

The benefits 

Improving your CX is a smart move, and leads to an increase in revenue, a boost in customer loyalty, stronger brand value, a better understanding of your customers and a clearer perspective of their needs and what they value the most. Costs will be reduced, and you’ll find that you’re investing in the right things at the right time with confidence.

Customer-centric all the way

A customer-centric approach not only mitigates the risk for your business. It also prevents many of the common mistakes that we see time and time again across many businesses. MVP's often get released based on stakeholder assumptions, and without having conducted research, which leads to much bigger problems later on. CX prevents these mistakes by focusing on solutions for customer pain points that really exist. 

Research

Listening to your customers is an essential step. If you don’t quite know where to start with your research, don’t worry. That’s exactly what CX researchers are for. Researchers ask the right questions to the right people. They investigate competitors and the current landscape. They translate complex research documentation into more accessible bite-size chunks that the whole team can access. This data becomes a crucial source of input for teams to reference back to throughout the design process. And the research doesn’t stop there. It’s a continuous cycle as we define, ideate, and test products, services, and experiences. Research acts as the foundation on which all other steps are based.

An overview of a standard design process

Design

Designers traditionally work closely with researchers to translate and define their findings into something more tangible, recognising common patterns, defining customer problems and needs, and prioritising tasks. As a designer myself, I focus on customer-centric problem-solving and follow the double diamond model alongside a standard design process. Some individual tasks listed beneath each step on the above graphic might be skipped based on client requirements, budget, project duration, individual business needs, etc.

The somewhat controversial double diamond model relating to CX

Jack-of-all-trades vs specialist

You'll often see both research and design combined as one role. While I enjoy working across both for short-term projects, I prefer to work alongside at least one researcher as part of a wider CX team. This can't always be the reality. But it's when CX is at its most optimal.

An overview of the UX process

The power of teams!

An example graph showing user drop-off rates during a badly designed sign-up process

Universal design and accessibility