Digital Marketers and User Experience

User experience is becoming an increasingly popular feature of the digital landscape. But digital marketers don’t always have a clear view of what it is, and how it impacts work. Here are some fundamentals of user experience, and how it impacts the work of digital marketers:

1. 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. This is only a subset of user experience, and only part of a much broader spectrum of skills associated with the discipline. Distilled to its essence, user experience is fundamentally about the relationship between people and technology. More than that, it’s about identifying and designing that relationship.

2. 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. 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.

3. 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. Much of digital marketing is focused on the channels we can reach customers through: print, digital, mobile. But the problem is that customers are really just people with a need — which our product addresses. And this is the hitch: People don’t have channels — they tend to live between the gaps in channels. Much of the problem of conversion rates tend to live in these gaps. These gaps are where user experience design lives. Having a user experience designer as part of your digital marketing team will help to redress this imbalance.