UX designing and CX designing

User center design, UCD, has been the most crucial turnkey in web development since the nineties, since the start of web development.
Putting the users in the focus of the design process has given to designers and developers a different mindset.

The designer and developer are users themself, and they probably struggled with other applications. With applications designed according to the poor available technology, or designed to satisfy clients' needs.

If it was a self-critical process of designers, or a normal evolution of technology, the fact that the focus moved to the users, gave us more usability and accessibility and products that justify proper investments in web applications.

This was also the beginning of a new challenge for designers. Combine the user-centered design with the client's needs, which are often impersonated in the form of outcome expectations, return on investment or the delivery of the most possible information at the minimum cost.

Sometimes user's needs and the client's needs are close and that makes the designing process easier. In projects where delivering the information is the client's need and the user's need is to get that information, the key to the success of the project is to achieve an ideal architecture of information.

There are many projects where the challenge is to combine the outcome expectation of the client with a contrasting need of the user to achieve the goal and leave the application as soon as possible. In that case, the whole application needs a deeper and more advanced strategy.

The strategy goes through the identification of all needs of both sides. These two lists will reveal where needs are similar and where they contrast.

In the next step, designers should suggest which kind of content or functionality satisfy each need. As Jesse James Garret suggests in his book, The elements of user experience", this is a milestone in the designing process:

"Strategy becomes scope when you translate user needs and product objectives into specific requirements for what content and functionality the product will offer to users." (Jesse James Garret, The elements of user experience design).

At the end of the day, taking care of both users and clients is equally important for the success of the project. The challenge for designers is to make clients aware that their expectations are not always in line with what users consider a good experience.

Again, empathy capability is a good feature for designers: understand clients to satisfy even better the UCD (user-centered design) concept. To better understand your clients, play in the same team with them, with the same objectives.