I just finished watching a very good webinar by Forrester entitled  ‘The Current State of the Customer Experience’ by Bruce Temkin. You can view his information rich blog entitled Customer Experience Matters. I think that in light of the recent events that I’ve been working in depth on an application, and recently had my laptop stolen, and was sick for a few days that it felt good to get back to Human Factors related work. I also enjoyed reading the comments that other attendees were making in the chat area during the presentation.

Bruce’s presentation had several good tidbits of information. His focus was Customer Experience (CxP), and I focus on User Experience (UX), so it’s interesting to see where the lines are crossed between these two fields. I believe that the recession has put more of a focus on Customer Service than ever. It as become an initiative at my company to focus on our customers, and our users. The differentiation between CxP and UX is that CxP involves all of the possible channels that can also link to a product, or web-enabled application. I focus on how people use the software that we engineer, not all of the process in place for them to purchase it, or receive support for it.

I do think that UX and CxP are related though. As UX should also convey the brand message throughout the user experience. One person in the chat room suggested that great  experience = (value*usability)/expectation. User experience is often times tied to usability, but it also relates to value and expectation.

Also during my UX work today I stumbled across a very informative website that deems itself “Wise ways and words in all matters creative”. The URL is creatingminds.org, this seems to me to be a good online resource for principles, tools, articles and quotes as they pertain to creativity.