Journey-Centric Design: Why Another Term? How is it Different?

Lately, I’ve been writing extensively about journey-centric design, a philosophy and framework that centers business and design operations around customer journeys. Some readers argue that this term merely adds another layer of jargon to an already established lexicon that includes journey mapping and service design.

Like many, I believe it's crucial not to contribute to the vocabulary inflation that occurs in our field. However, I believe that the distinction of journey-centric design is important for highlighting how organizations are evolving their design operations to address contemporary challenges

Products, Not Journeys, Have Been the Focus of UX

While journey mapping, omnichannel UX, and service design have been discussed and practiced by UX designers for years, they have never been the primary focus of UX work. Instead, UX within organizations has largely been product-centric, focused on the design and development of applications and interfaces.

For instance, journey maps are often created as one-off initiatives to support product-centric UX efforts. Although some organizations, such as SaaS companies, have dedicated service design functions, most do not. Even in organizations that engage more in service design, the emphasis tends to be on creating new journeys for specific use cases—such as guiding SaaS subscribers through upgrading their software—rather than optimizing existing journeys that users navigate across established channels.

Customer journeys may receive more attention within organizations that have a well-established Customer Experience function. However, most CX teams have traditionally focused on gathering insights and perception metrics, such as Net Promoter Score, for these journeys. Many do not actively facilitate the user-centered design work necessary to optimize them.

The reality is that most organizations are not intentionally designing customer journeys in a proactive and operationalized manner. Instead, the journey experience emerges from how individual product touchpoints connect(or don’t connect) as customers navigate across them. This underscores the need for a shift toward journey-centric design, which can help organizations better manage and optimize customer experiences

Journey-Centric Design: Why Another Term?

Journey-centric design is not a term I coined; it is one used by CX and design leaders, as well as organizations aiming to address what they identify as the primary barrier to delivering a good customer experience: disjointed product teams and organizational silos that lack a unified strategy or framework for collaboration.

These silos, along with design operations that focus solely on products, create significant challenges in improving the customer journey experience. Such structures impede the level of collaboration and strategic coordination necessary to enhance customer journeys effectively.

A New Term Facilitates Discussion Around a New Approach

With mature digital products in place, companies are recognizing that their greatest opportunities for design innovation lie within customer journeys rather than individual products. However, without an operational framework for collaboration across departments and teams, pursuing this work is challenging and is certainly not scalable across the organization.

Organizations are beginning to realize that to effectively implement journey-focused design at scale, they must foster cross-functional connectivity and establish an overarching design strategy. Companies whose business models are primarily service-based and are heavily supported by digital service channels have been among the first to develop solutions to this fundamental issue, which negatively impacts service delivery and constrains innovation.

The term "journey-centric design" describes an emerging operational model for design that enables organizations to intentionally optimize journey experiences.

Party-hat model for journey-centric design: Journey-centric design facilitates connectivity and collaboration between a network of crossfunctional contributors from product teams and groups from other organizational silos such as business teams, marketing, technology, and operations. Together, these contributors work to optimize customer journeys for improved performance. Image originally published by Nielsen Norman Group.

By establishing a journey-centric operational framework, companies can manage journeys in much the same way they have traditionally managed digital products. This framework is designed to foster connectivity and strategic alignment among all stakeholders who influence the customer journey. Key features of the framework include:

• A systems-thinking approach to design that reflects the reality of how customers consume and experience services across a larger ecosystem of channels and touchpoints.

• An overarching CX strategy that drives design priorities across all journeys and products.

• A prioritization framework to effectively manage and prioritize design and implementation work across disparate teams.

• Models for collaboration among siloed functional groups and product teams.

With this, organizations can practice customer journey-management, with dedicated teams researching, measuring, optimizing, and orchestrating a customer journey to improve customer experience while enhancing profitability.

Journey-centric design introduces a layer of journey-design strategy that influences product-design strategy. Image originally published by Nielsen Norman Group.

Conclusion

At first glance, the term "journey-centric design" may seem to complicate our existing vocabulary, but it reflects a significant evolution in how organizations operationalize user experience design. By shifting from fragmented approaches to a cohesive journey-centric model, businesses can create a more effective design practice that addresses the needs of modern consumers. This transition is a vital advancement toward maximizing the potential of UX and CX in the complex business ecosystems of today

This new term acknowledges and formalizes a shift that is already underway in the industry, promoting a holistic perspective on UX. It emphasizes moving the focus from individual products and screens to the entirety of the experience as customers navigate various channels to achieve their goals.

By engaging in this conversation about terminology, we can better articulate the challenges and opportunities that lie ahead in our pursuit of delivering meaningful and impactful customer experiences