Digest...

1. User Experience Is Not Just About Interfaces

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. As the amount of technology and digital disruption in the world increases, so too, the nature of this relationship comes to the fore.

2. User Experience Touches the Product Itself, Not Just the Promotion of It
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. This can at times place them at odds with marketing teams, who are normally more closely focused on how to drive more sales of a given, fixed product. At the same time, user experience designers often work in close proximity with digital marketing teams, and are often responsible for some of the optimization that happens with campaigns. 

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.  And this is the hitch: people don’t have channels – they tend to live between the gaps in channels. This fundamentally cripples most marketing efforts from the outset, as 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.

4: User Experience Uses Multiple Research Approaches

User experience is an intensively research focused discipline, that is naturally focused on discovering and understanding real human needs that can be solved for with a well designed product. This means that the methodological focus for design research is qualitative in nature. This makes it excellent at framing a problem or situation, so that it can be more accurately assessed quantitatively. 

5. User Experience Will Subsume Much of What Currently Counts as Digital Marketing 

It will be everywhere, and invisible. It will be "on" forever. And so the core skills of digital marketing will cease to be attributable to digital marketing alone, and will instead be subsumed into larger conversations around digital products and services – more specifically, they will be essential ingredients in well-designed products – not just optional bolt ons to a static, existing offering. 

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