What is UX? Explaining UX to marketing
User experience, or UX, focuses on the interaction with a physical or digital product. User Experience Design (UxD) is how a firm researches users’ needs and how they interact with a product to build insights they incorporate into the design of a product. UxD does not focus only on technical aspects of functional benefits but also on emotional dimensions. A key example is the work of Philips Design for their MRI machines for kids, where Philips teamed up with Disney to gamify the MRI for children by reducing their anxiety about the process while improving the diagnostic output.
User research is the first step in the UX design process. User interviews, surveys, co-design, and co-creation workshops are a few techniques a UX designer might use to get a clear picture of a user’s needs, desires, fears, and anxieties. This research then feeds into a design and development stage to create a product or service, or combination that meets those needs. The following steps are also research-centric but focus on other dimensions: usability testing and user testing. This research determines if users’ behavior falls within the expected range and if the experience meets the expectations. Results of the research then feedback into a new round of design—and the iterative process continues.
User experience can generally be broken down into three key domains: appearance, functionality, and usability.
What do marketers understand about UX?
There are two aspects marketers understand about UX
1) Research
Marketers usually work with research on consumer behaviors, preferences, and spending patterns. UX design deal with user needs and behaviors. Both fields are heavily focused on research, and it is pretty safe to say that both a marketing specialist and UX designer wouldn’t be able to perform their work properly without first doing a fair bit of research.
There’s also a significant overlap in research techniques you might have employed as a marketer and those used by a UX designer: interviews, focus group discussions, surveys, ethnographic research, formulation of user personas, and many more.
2) Psychology and Consumer Behavior
Both Marketing and UX design focus on the desirability or liking of the product or service. Marketing aims to create appealing and trendy products and brands for consumers and shoppers. UX design aims to make products desirable to users, so they’ll have a great experience while using them. In both fields, psychology plays a significant role.
A keen understanding of psychology is crucial to appeal to users by delivering value—social, economic, or otherwise—and using elements like typography, colors, and imagery to invoke emotional responses. The difference is that marketing specialists like you apply psychology in designing the best marketing campaign for a product. In contrast, UX designers use it to develop the best product for a user.
What marketers really really do not understand about UX?
Marketers think of people in terms of shoppers and consumers. UX Designers think of people in terms of users. While this seems just a minor semantic nuance, it’s a key difference to understand the distance between one and the other. In marketing, “people” must have some economic transaction, either directly or indirectly. In the UX domain, the focus is on usage, and while the UX deals with pre and post-shopping experiences, the economic nature of the transaction is secondary.
Another big symbolic difference between the two is: Marketing is about attracting new users, and user experience (UX) encourages visitors to come back again and again.
Marketing is focused on increasing overall sales of the product, which ultimately increases the company’s bottom line. On the other hand, UX design focuses on creating the best experience for the end-user, regardless of whether or not it ultimately adds to the business’s bottom line. There exists a distinction between the desired objectives of the two functions. Fortunately, as research has shown, when companies pay attention to their user experience, they indirectly contribute to the company’s bottom line.
In some cases, the differences in the endpoint between marketing and UX design can result in sub-optimal outcomes. An example of a dark pattern is when a website deliberately tricks users into purchasing a product by using an interface that looks like it’s doing something else. Dark designs, such as the automatic addition of travel insurance when booking an airline ticket and Facebook’s past attempts to prevent users from achieving complete privacy, are often the results of marketing goals to increase conversions in any way possible.
Branded apps are an example of a less insidious divergence of goals between marketing (branding) and user experience design. Companies love using branded applications to boost their engagement with customers. Still, a study by Deloitte found that most branded apps fail because the apps are not a digital component that contributes to the UX of a product but a marketing campaign disguised as an app.
What is UI?
User Interface (UI) is often discussed in conjunction with user experience. First and foremost, UI belongs to the digital realm. Therefore it includes the aesthetic appearance of the devices, response time, and the content displayed to the user within the contexts of the user interface. Both UX and UI fall under HCI (Human-Computer Interaction), which is the field of science focused on creating computer technologies and the interaction between humans, computers, and all forms of IT. Specifically, HCI studies areas such as User Interface Design (UiD), User Experience Design (UxD),
Generally, designing a user interface aims to create an easy, efficient, and fun interface to make it easier for the user to operate the machine to achieve the desired result. In general, the operator must provide minimal input to achieve the desired outcome, and the device will minimize unwanted effects for the user.
For example, user interfaces tend to deal with the basic features of devices, such as screens, buttons, scrolling features, and sounds. User experiences are the more general term covering everything a user experiences from beginning to end. The user interface is a vital part of a user’s overall experience because it’s the component of a device that a person interacts with most frequently. Still, it does not cover the entire scope of a user’s experience across a website or app. One common metaphor for user interface (UI) design vs. user experience ( UX) is comparing their products to restaurants. If UI is the plates, silverware, and napkin, UX is the lighting and music that facilitate your dining experience.
Marketers and UI
Marketers typically think of user interface (UI) as the controls used to interact with technology: checkboxes, buttons, menus, and so forth to access the technology. But user interface (UI) has expanded to include how people interact with everything online, including search, information collection, and social media. UI is evolving to consider NLP-processing apps, like the ones based on virtual assistants.
The fundamental UI question marketers must ask is ‘how hard is it to find the valuable information we have available for potential buyers and researchers’? For marketers, UI design can be driven by behavior analytics like heat mapping that tells them how visitors interact with the site.
According to this article, there are seven typical mistakes that marketers push in the UI domain. Of those, we believe the most critical are the following:
1) Too many (or not present at all) Call-to-actions: marketers strive (and very often fail) to strike a balance between CTAs on a page.
2) Too many pop-ups (why do you still need pop-ups in 2022?!?!): pop-ups are the typical UI (and UX) failure. How often has it happened to you to access a website on a URL because you needed to run a quick search and wait for the various pop-ups to disappear?
3) Not-responsive design, which poorly adapts to screens other than desktops
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