Journey-Centric Design: The Evolution of UX-Design Operations for The Coming Era

After collecting four case studies and speaking to leaders at 20 organizations, I’ve documented the next frontier of experience design — journey-centric design. This new method of structuring design work solves many of the challenges faced by UX and product professionals for decades.

Read on to discover journey-centric design. For detailed case studies and advice for preparing your company for the modern digital age, buy our premium research report, Architecting a Journey-Management Practice, or inquire about our consulting services.

Product-Centric Design Limits Innovation, Optimization, and Profitability

Organizations have traditionally operated in silos, with separate business departments working independently. This structure was effective in the past when customers interacted with brands in person and over the phone.

Over the past few decades, as the internet matured, companies have invested in product development to meet the demand for digital business solutions.

Digital experts such as developers and UX professionals were integrated into existing siloed structures with a product-centric approach to design and development. With this type of approach, product teams worked independently, focusing on building usable digital products through user-centered design. This strategy made sense at the time and proved successful for many years.

However, the digital business landscape has changed radically since this structure was developed. Digital channels built over time by siloed product teams have resulted in fragmented customer experiences full of inconsistencies and roadblocks for customers traversing these omnichannel ecosystems to complete tasks. The siloed, product-centric operational model of the past has become restrictive and ineffective. Businesses are left trying to serve today’s customers with yesterday’s solutions.

Just like a computer operating system becomes outdated, unable to keep up, and unable to process effectively over time, an organization’s operating system does, too. To compete in this new era of digital business, the approach to product design and development desperately needs an update. 

The Solution: Journey-Centric Design

Our problem today is that there is no cohesive design strategy for business services delivered across digital channels. Digital products are designed for effectiveness, but the journeys that customers take across the digital-channel ecosystem are not. This is not just a customer-experience problem; it’s a business-value problem.

Journey-centric design is a philosophy and framework that focuses business and design operations around customer journeys.

Rather than dismantling corporate silos (an endeavor that, in most cases, would be nearly impossible), organizations need to change how they work by creating connectivity across silos. This is done by enabling collaboration across the organization to facilitate end-to-end journey design and optimization.

Through journey-centric design operations, companies can cure the ills of a digital ecosystem built with a product-centric mindset. Journey-centric design enables comprehensive design enhancements across digital products. With a shared vision and crossfunctional collaboration, companies can deliver innovative business solutions, improving outcomes for both the business and its customers.

Journey-Centric Design vs. Journey Management

Journey management is often used interchangeably with journey-centric design. Although both are correct, there is some nuance to these labels.

Here’s the difference.

Journey-Centric Design	A philosophy and framework that focuses business and design operations around customer journeys This term emphasizes putting customer journeys at the center of operations.
Journey Management	Journey management is the ongoing practice of researching, measuring, optimizing, and orchestrating a customer journey to improve customer experience and achieve business goals. This term emphasizes the continuous management of customer journeys by employing journey-centric design operations.

Journey-centric operations must be established before journey management can become an ongoing practice.

Once these operations are established, the company can begin managing journeys like products to improve performance through ongoing research, design optimization, dynamic orchestration, and measurement.

Benefits of Journey-Centric Design

Through product-centric design, organizations optimize the customer experience at the micro level, within product interfaces, down to the most-effective form design and button copy.

In today’s landscape of complex-product ecosystems, product-focused design enhancements are unlikely to generate significant business value. However, solutions that span multiple products and channels offer many more opportunities for business impact and innovation.

Journey-centric design enables organizations to apply user-centered design at both the micro level (interfaces within products) and the macro level (longitudinal service delivery through customer journeys).

This paradigm shift in the way user-centered design is applied brings four major benefits to the business, including:

• More opportunity for design innovation, resulting in improved business outcomes
• A more-strategic and business-driven approach to service delivery
• More-advanced behavioral data and measurement of design’s return on investment (ROI)
• Opportunities for AI-driven solutions to personalize service delivery for improved outcomes

More Opportunity for Design Innovation

Journey experiences are a largely untapped space for design innovation. For this reason, journey-centric design allows companies to solve larger service-delivery problems with transformational solutions. Optimizing how services are delivered maximizes revenue, minimizes the cost to serve, and boosts overall customer satisfaction and customer lifetime value.

A More-Strategic and Business-Driven Approach to Service Delivery

Product-focused design happens on product teams that are far removed from top-level business strategies. Journey-centered design gives executive decision makers access to the big picture of their customers’ experiences with the organization. It also enables them to turn business initiatives into digital solutions that work well across multiple products as opposed to separate fixes tailored to each product in isolation.

Journey-centric design operations allow the organization to be nimbler in rolling out broad-scope business initiatives that are cohesively delivered across products.

More-Advanced Behavioral Data and Measurement of Design ROI

Journey-centric design operations enable businesses to examine customer activities from an end-to-end perspective. Developing and maturing this practice includes establishing analytics and performance metrics centered around the longitudinal journeys that generate revenue for the business.

Journey-level analytics are relevant and actionable for business stakeholders, who care more about the outcomes of customer journeys than about the outcomes of individual steps that customers take within products. In addition, having journey-level analytics and performance benchmarks makes it easier to demonstrate the impact of journey-centric design initiatives on the business.

More Opportunity for AI-Driven Solutions to Personalize Service Delivery

Over time, as organizations mature their journey-centric design approach, they will establish a foundation for more-advanced journey-centric customer data analysis. With end-to-end journey analytics, organizations will be poised to leverage AI solutions to personalize journey experiences.

AI-driven journey analytics and orchestration tools are evolving quickly. These tools will help us analyze historical behavioral trends for key customer journeys. Thus, we will be well-positioned to understand the needs of different customer segments and learn which interactions, content, and behaviors affect business outcomes.

These tools will also allow us to predict customers’ needs in real time as they progress through these journeys and dynamically orchestrate how the journey is delivered to improve business outcomes.

Journey analytics and AI-based orchestration are not a replacement for thoughtful user-centered design. You can’t fix poor experiences through orchestration alone. These tools require a significant investment in technology integration and data modeling. They should be seen as a supplement to journey-centric operations.

Improved Operational Structures for Journey-Centric Design 

With customer journeys as the focal point for design operations, the organization can shift away from fragmented design strategies that consider only digital products. Instead, they can consider the totality of the customer-journey experience and leverage insights from across functional groups to develop a unified design strategy for the customer journey to achieve business objectives.

This approach allows the organization to translate top-level business strategy into journey-level design initiatives that ultimately influence the design work done by individual product teams.

Companies Are Making the Shift

Journey-centric design is not just a theory—for some organizations, it’s become a reality. Some organizations have architected improved design operations to advance their UX maturity and make the shift from product-centric to journey-centric design.

The approach to journey-centric design should be evolutionary, not revolutionary. Employing journey-centric design does not mean that product design and management are obsolete. It means that product teams will be plugged into a broader, overarching journey-centric design strategy.

Journey-centric design does bring both strategic and operational changes to how product teams function going forward. Product managers play a central role in journey-centric design. This is imperative, as their own product-focused initiatives, roadmaps, and backlogs will be influenced by the needs of the journeys they support.

Although product teams will participate in portions of the journey-centric design process, they also need to continue their established design and development processes. However, the projects they work on will be a mix of their product priorities and the priorities of the journeys they support.

Organizations usually start small, focusing on a strategic customer journey as the scope for an exploratory pilot effort. This effort allows them to conceptualize the operational aspects of journey-centric design, test, and iterate on an approach that works for them.

Our Research and Detailed Case Studies

To help organizations facilitate the transition toward journey-centric design, we’ve conducted two in-depth research studies:

1. A six-month diary study. Individuals practicing journey-centric design in their organizations provided weekly insights and participated in interviews.
2. In-depth case studies. Team members from four organizations partnered with NN/g researchers to provide detailed information about their organizations’ journey-centric approach. We explored the evolution of their approach through multiple rounds of interviews and provided documentation, uncovering how they created crossfunctional connectivity and the operational processes to facilitate design and implementation across products.

In addition to these specific research studies, over the past several years, I’ve conducted more than 15 additional in-depth interviews with leaders and practitioners to learn how they implement and practice journey-centric design within their organizations.

Architecting a Journey-Management Practice

Journey-centric design is an emerging practice; little prescriptive guidance has been provided to help companies transition. We’re proud to offer consulting services in this space, as well as our published insights in our report Architecting a Journey-Management Practice.

In this report, you’ll discover how real businesses tackle the challenge of designing journey experiences within siloed organizations. This prescriptive guide includes operational models and strategic frameworks for developing a journey-centric design practice that can be applied within organizations of any size and industry. 

The report also includes two in-depth case studies illustrating how leading-edge organizations retooled their design operations to support a journey-centric design strategy.