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The blurring lines between UX and digital marketing
The usability and sellability of things are becoming one and the same, but it’s still too narrow a view.
Some of my favorite things to consider in UX are above and beyond the reach of the website or application I’m designing. I’m intensely interested in studying people's behavior as they navigate multiple platforms, touchpoints, and interactions with everything in their lives. We traditionally call this CX (customer experience), but I’d like to propose that as the digital and commercial worlds converge more with our natural world, it’s now just our human experience (HX).
When we identify and try to solve a problem we are facing, how do we do that? Less and less, we look to individual products like a single app and website. As designers, we build these as siloed entities, but to a user, they are not independent experiences. Everything a human does before and after they engage with your product affects how they might interact with it.
Usability — which starts as a human-centered design initiative — is being wound more and more tightly into digital marketing, sales, and other areas. Are they still separate practices, symbiotic, or are we entering an era where they are one and the same?
