User experience work is something still quite new in my country, Vietnam. I have heard someone mentioned about it throughout meetings or on company’s strategic documents. Luckily, I have had a chance to work in a retail aspect where always seems to be the most active business field in the world. Hence, I could daily hear and see what people shared about their sales and marketing strategies, marketing design ideas, marketing contents, or visual design ideas for shopping mall channels, etc. There seems to be thousands of things to do in the marketing department in a retail company. And yes, it is more common to call those works as marketing activities in Vietnam, rather than user experience (UX) design work. I think in general; the final purpose of both works is similar. Both marketing and the user experience work is to try to understand every day the need of users or customers better. Moreover, together with strategic tools or creative design ideas, the company can improve the products and service continuously in order to satisfy their users as well as to make them feel pleasure throughout their shopping or products/service interaction journey, and finally to lead them to take the shopping decision of the products which can make them feel most happy and proud of without any interruption.
What does UX design mean and how is it different from marketing activities?
I have read through all the links shared in the user experience class. There are many definitions about the user experience design term. I like to call the UX design as a customer focused design process which aims to produce the products or services in order to bring a joy to own, a joy to use or a simple and elegant experiences without causing any fuss or bother to the customers. UX design is functioned to meet the needs of customers, even can see through those needs very well and offer for the customers out of what they can ever expect.
It is interesting to learn that everything around us has been designed for some purposes, like a well- furnished house, a modern working office, an amusement park, or even little stylish wooden details on the sofa, etc. All these creative designing works are to make the life of human being more comfortable and happier day by day. Human- focused creative ideas are a key to decide whether a thing is necessary to be created. In a modern life, when the term the customer-driven business strategy becomes popular and has no argument, the customers are defined to keep in hands many powers as kings. The growth of business usually goes together with the growth of product quality and customer service quality, which most of companies are dealing to satisfy their customers with the most premium standards. At the same time, another concept related closely to the designing a great customer experience is usability- which means a measure how effectively, efficiently, and satisfactorily a product can serve the user or customer to achieve their specific goal in a specific context.
Even though both marketing and UX design activities are for creating the product or services which are as much desirable as possible by the customers, in my opinion, there are still some differences behind. If the marketing specialists’ effort is to apply psychological strategy in designing the best marketing campaigns for a product to make the customers happy to purchase, UX designer will also track on the psychology of customers, but to produce the products to make their shopping experience great. Like in Vietnam, we have a sentence: ‘Vui lòng khách đến, vừa lòng khách đi’. It means if the customers are happy to visit your store, make them satisfied when they leave. I think if a company can invest in UX design, it can help them get more customers, more sales, customers’ loyalty, and commitment to the brand, etc.
I am kind of being fond of any activities related to marketing, creativity, and psychology. That is the reason why I am quite curious of learning more about user experience design. Participating in the class also came from the reason that I would like to find the solution for creating the good customer experience for Hekumu online shop. Hekumu is my herbal tea business which is in a very early stage. I am expecting to learn a lot from classmates and teacher. My goal is to get to know about the successful cases in creating user experience on the online platform and then can apply them for Hekumu practice. Some of them can be a successful tip for me to adopt in my future business decisions.