Is CX the new UX?

Just like in private life, there are ever changing fashions in our business lives, too. This is also true for how we call the things we deal with at work.

Since when I started looking into how humans interact with machines and how we can help both get along better, I have seen quite a few names come and go. Back at university we talked about ergonomics, man-machine interaction or work psychology. Later on, when we set up a usability lab to test the new websites of the dot com bubble years, everyone was into usability and user-centered design. We soon traded usability for user experience, when we discussed what we actually wanted to improve. Accordingly, no one wanted to do screen design any longer, but rather preferred UX design.

Of course it's true that other words usually imply another meaning, too. User experience is a much wider concept than usability. And the usability community rightly understood that they had to look after more than efficient online processes if they wanted to make users happy. However, the involved colleagues and their tools tend to stay the same, even if they collectively choose to redefine their professional playfield.

Recently, another paradigm change has occurred in the global researchers and designers community: The concept of customer experience has overtaken user experience in popularity. If we look at how the global search volume for both terms evolved on Google since 2004, we see that both slightly increased for quite a while on the same level. Since 2014 customer experience however shows a steep increase in importance over user experience:

In my own experience, this is reflected in the briefs I get from my customers and in the way fellow researchers and designers frame their credentials today. Customer centricity is what we are about today, when it used to be user-centered design yesterday.

Is CX the new UX then?

It is, if we understand it as an attempt to understanding and improving a target person's experience on a broader basis. In fact, it makes sense considering the entire customer journey (which may just as well encompass offline touchpoints) and not only single user interfaces when it comes to making customers enjoy their relation with a business.

"Customer experience (CX) is a term commonly used to define UX over long periods of time." - Nielsen Norman Group

The fact that "customer" might narrow down the field a little bit too much (what about the prospects' experience?) can be neglected when in turn the industry has found a common understanding that we need to look at a person's over-arching experience at every moment of their prospect / customer life cycle.

What I think is important is that the mindset of the UX R&D specialists has made it into the realm of CX: Agility, a view on the resulting experiences rather than tech specifications, and essentially an attitude which puts the users / customers at the center of attention. I recommend Nielsen Norman's take on the UX/CX debate as a good read here.

Markets with a different view

When I played around with Google trends for this article, I found some astounding differences in the usage of both terms across countries. This is the Google search volume for user experience vs. customer experience in the UK since 2004:

The British colleagues seem to always have slightly favored CX over UX, and CX took off already in 2010 against UX. The same analysis shows quite a different picture for Germany, though:

User experience is still searched for more than customer experience today in Germany, even though both terms have seen a similarly steep increase in the last years. Today, Germany is one of the few countries left (together only with Poland, Belarus, Slovakia and Morocco) where the concept of UX (blue) still dominates over CX (red):

UX is dead, long live CX?

I expect to see the remaining markets converting soon to the broader view of understanding and serving customers' needs throughout all of their journey. However, understanding and optimizing the user experience (and usability) is still one of our core tasks, given the nature of most touchpoints being digital. We are changing names for it -- and there you have your fashion wording.