User Experience (UX) refers to a person’s emotions and attitudes about using a particular product, system, or service. It includes the practical, experiential, affective, meaningful, and valuable aspects of human-computer interaction and product ownership. Additionally, it includes a person’s perceptions of system aspects such as utility, ease of use and efficiency.
User experience may be considered subjective in nature to the degree that it is about individual perception and thought with respect to the system. User experience is dynamic as it is constantly modified over time due to changing usage circumstances and changes to individual systems as well as the wider usage context in which they can be found.
Importance of User Experience in Digital Marketing
When it comes to developing and executing modern digital marketing strategies, there’s one important thing that often gets forgotten: user experience (UX). This is unfortunate since it’s a critically important component of successful marketing in a digital age that prioritizes convenience and personalization.
- User Experience is not just about Interfaces
The biggest misconception about user experience is that it is about creating beautiful interfaces. While this is part of user experience, it’s really only a small part of a much larger discipline with a broader mandate. The act of designing an interface, most often when it occurs on a screen, is called user interface design, or interaction design. - User Experience Touches the Product Itself, Not Just the Promotion of It
There is a fundamental difference between digital marketing and user experience, and it really boils down to this: marketing is about making people want things. The design is about making things that people want.
User experience is driven by design. This means that it tends to live more naturally toward the product design end of the spectrum. User experience designers have the habit of asking “why?” about many product decisions. - Experience Happens Anyway – You Only Get to Decide Whether You’ll Design for It
Experiences with the products we promote happen, regardless of whether or not we’ve included them in our marketing plan. Put simply, the most important marketing we will ever do usually happens outside the moments or channels we market to, and it’s called experience - User Experience Uses Multiple Research Approaches
Digital marketing typically doesn’t generate much in the way of research. Often, the relationship with research tends to be limited to interpreting the outputs of a broader marketing-focused research program. Marketing research tends to be focused more on quantifying a known market, for a fixed product. This tends to make it often focus much more on quantitative methods. - User Experience May Subsume Some Aspects of Digital Marketing
The social Web has already disrupted marketing to an incredible degree. What used to be primarily a discipline in managing returns on broadcast media expenditure has eveolved to become a discipline of managing conversations and contributing to communities.
So what will happen when not just people, but products become part of the social web? With the dawn of the Internet of Things, we’re faced with an even greater force for disruption in the future; most interactions on the social Web will be between products, or products and people, not just people.
