Customer experience (CX) design is the discipline of deliberately shaping and optimizing every interaction a person has with a brand, before, during, and after a purchase or conversion. As a CX designer, you strive to deliver consistent value, provide emotional resonance, and instill loyalty in customers who are glad to have converted and continue enjoying products and services while they support brands they trust.
In this video, Frank Spillers, Service Designer, and Founder and CEO of Experience Dynamics, explains how customer experience extends beyond user interactions to include the entire brand relationship, showing how CX and user experience (UX) complement each other in shaping satisfaction and loyalty.
CX design deserves its place in design terminology because it involves so much. Instead of treating CX as an afterthought or a marketing add-on, brands with CX designers embed customer-centric thinking across the entire business so that the sum of all touchpoints fosters trust, delight, and preference.
Because CX is broad, it naturally overlaps with:
UX design, itself a broad discipline with a focus on interactions with specific products or systems and user satisfaction.
Service design, which deals with the systems and backstage processes that support consistent experiences across channels.
Operations
Marketing
Support.
Still, CX forms a kind of umbrella under which many of those disciplines live.
A core aspect of this “super-discipline” is that as a CX designer, you view customers as whole human beings whose perceptions, emotions, and behaviors evolve over time. Another point: each brand is far more than just a product or interface and the sum thereof; it’s a living relationship that must earn coherence, predictability, and empathy. Last, but not least, CX design stands apart as both strategic and tactical; it spans massive concepts, such as brand promise, promise delivery, emotional tone, and granular moments: “items” like onboarding emails, wait times, and help desk scripts.
The Nielsen Norman Group splits CX into three levels: the single‑interaction, journey, and relationship levels of experience. More specifically:
The interaction level focuses on single touchpoints, like completing a purchase or clicking a button; each one should feel seamless and intuitive.
The journey level looks at how those interactions connect across time and channels to help users achieve a broader goal, such as researching, buying, and receiving a product.
The relationship level considers the customer’s long-term perception of the brand. Repeated interactions, emotional tone, and consistency shape this over months or years.
CX professionals need a good working knowledge of UX as it forms a large chunk of their responsibilities.
© Interaction Design Foundation, CC BY-SA 4.0
When you’re good at your craft as a CX designer, you and your brand can enjoy:
Many industries offer similar products, making it all the more difficult to stand out. Enter customer experience into the equation: it becomes the distinguishing factor when functionality and price are equal, and prospective users turn into content customers because your product’s CX reaches them in ways your competitors can’t.
Getting people to buy and love your product or marketplace offering is one thing; keeping it successful is another. A positive, consistent experience is the “X” factor that keeps people coming back and recommending brands that deliver that factor to others.
What’s one element of the “magic” of successful design? It’s where smooth, thoughtful interactions reduce customer effort and increase satisfaction in experiences that satisfy and please seamlessly.
Customers return to brands they trust, ones that prove true empathy with them. CX done well builds that trust over time and helps your product or service weave itself into the fabric of real people’s everyday experiences.
When internal systems and touchpoints align with customer needs, processes improve across the board and can deliver success solidly and consistently. CX design professionals know what it takes to delight customers and keep them happy, and a customer-centric consciousness helps flow between departments and keeps things running smoothly.
CX design allows teams to connect feedback, metrics, and experience data to real design decisions. It pays to measure customer satisfaction and account for, and accommodate, the details that matter to the people who matter to the brand.
Discover how analytics tools reveal behavioral and demographic patterns that help you understand user goals and enhance their experience, in this video with William Hudson, User Experience Strategist and Founder of Syntagm Ltd.
Author: Stewart Cheifet. Appearance time: 0:22 - 0:24. Copyright license and terms: CC / Fair Use. Modified: Yes. Link: https://archive.org/details/CC1218greatestgames
CX design done well can show up in many forms. Here is an example of where you might apply it:
Physical + Digital Retail
A customer buys in-store but manages their account via an app. With both “bricks-and-mortar” and digital at play, CX design ensures consistency between:
In-store service tone
App functionality
Promotions and loyalty programs
Returns and exchanges
Use the following process to set a course for exceptional customer experiences for your product, service, brand, and customers.
First things first: adopt a customer-first mindset and shift the focus away from product features and internal goals to the all-important human factors of customer outcomes and emotions.
Design around what customers are trying to achieve, not what’s easiest for your internal processes. Customers won’t care about the inner workings of the brand; they just want products and services that speak to them and delight them. Define their problem with solid and active research.
User research methods like interviews, observations, and usability testing help you design around real customer goals and behaviors, as this video explains.
Expand that research to conduct interviews, observe behavior, run surveys, and analyze data to uncover real motivations and pain points. This is your chance to explore the many angles that make up the behavior and needs of the people who pay for what you deliver to them. Listen and learn from real customers; they’re already telling you what’s broken.
Analyze behavioral data and support logs to flesh out findings. Also, audit current touchpoints and identify inconsistencies. And, another essential ingredient: create personas (research-based, synthetic representations of real customers).
In this video, William Hudson explains how personas help teams shift from technology-driven or role-based assumptions to a truly user-centered design approach by maintaining focus on who the users are, what they need, and how they work.
Use journey mapping to document each stage your customer goes through. Include both emotional highs and pain points, everything that means something to the customer and what they feel as they encounter the various points where they find, use, and interact with your brand.
Create detailed journey maps that include feelings, needs, and context. When you do, highlight pain points, inconsistencies, and critical moments of truth.
Brainstorm improvements collaboratively across your organization’s departments. Then, prioritize ideas based on customer impact and implementation ease. Particularly prioritize experience opportunities; identify where small changes can make big differences. Begin where pain is high and effort is low.
Ensure you align teams, such as marketing, product, support, and ops, to agree on shared CX goals and ideate towards them. When you help break down silos, everyone can find clearer ideas of the complexities of real-world user behavior, needs, and much more.
In this video, William Hudson explains how to structure brainstorming sessions that encourage free thinking, collaboration, and the development of innovative, workable ideas.
Design lightweight prototypes for key experiences and test them with real users. Prototyping is like a magic key to access a wealth of insights, so test with users who can validate solutions. It’s an excellent, if not essential, way to learn early and learn quickly so you can get on the right track to deliver exceptional customer experiences.
In this video, Alan Dix, Author of the bestselling book “Human-Computer Interaction” and Director of the Computational Foundry at Swansea University, shows you how prototyping, testing, and refining designs with users help you learn quickly, uncover problems early, and improve usability step by step.
Align front-end design with back-end systems. Ensure team members across all relevant departments receive training to deliver on new experience principles.
In this video, Frank Spillers explains how understanding the line of visibility and the line of interaction helps you connect what customers see with the complex systems behind the scenes to deliver seamless experiences.
Consistency assures customers of your trustworthiness and more. Everything from the brand voice and logo to far beyond. So, keep tone, policies, branding, and service levels aligned across all touchpoints.
Offer tailored experiences, but don’t overstep. There’s a maximum level of closeness you can take things where customers value relevance. If you go beyond that, they might feel uncomfortable and that your brand is invasive.
Look for small irritations, such as confusing forms and unnecessary steps, and eliminate them. Remember, people don’t encounter brands in a vacuum; they’re often in the middle of something, and their contexts of use will largely influence them to decide how much they like your product, service, and brand.
In this video, Alan Dix explains how considering the context of use, including users’ surroundings, physical conditions, and emotional states, helps you design smoother experiences that fit naturally into real-life situations.
Let people feel (and stay) in control; if it’s to be a great experience, they have to feel ownership of it. So, avoid forcing choices or creating dead ends.
Design experiences that feel human; ones that are respectful, empathetic, and warm prove your brand cares genuinely about meeting customer needs with authentic professionalism and care.
Explore why empathy forms the lifeblood of the bond that keeps people trusting products and services they love, and how to design for it, in this video.
To be the best, use customer data to learn and improve. Don’t just guess; test, find room for improvement, and adjust. Be sure to measure what matters; pick a few key metrics, such as net promoter score (NPS), and track them over time to determine impact.
CX doesn’t live in just one department; brand success requires shared goals across teams and for everyone to be on the same page, long after the launch of a digital product or service, for example. This is why it’s essential to build feedback loops. Ensure that frontline employees and support staff regularly share insights and trends.
Make customer-centricity part of your brand story, hiring process, and performance reviews and keep it top of mind. “Put the customer first” might sound like a typical corporate mantra, but it’s vital and should be central to your brand. Customers deserve that special focal point in the combined consciousness of everyone on board your teams.
Monitor feedback, behavior, and satisfaction. Tweak experiences based on real-time signals. It’s always time to keep evolving, as experience expectations rise fast. Stay curious, humble, and open to change.
When you follow a strong CX design process, you can find users and customers enjoying better experiences and more. Consider these two examples:
SaaS (Software as a Service)
A user signs up for a trial, struggles with onboarding, contacts support, and then decides not to renew. Good CX design improves:
First-time user experience
In-app guidance and tutorials
Responsive, empathetic support
Win-back and feedback loops
Physical + Digital Retail
A customer buys in-store but manages their account via an app. With both “bricks-and-mortar” and digital at play, CX design ensures consistency between:
In-store service tone
App functionality
Promotions and loyalty programs
Returns and exchanges
Consider the following common areas that tend to trip brands up:
Don’t assume CX = UX: Digital usability is critical, indeed, but CX includes the entire relationship with the brand, not just product use and UX design concerns.
Don’t ignore operations: If the backend can’t deliver the promise made by design or marketing, the experience fails, all the worse after customers have pegged such high expectations. Keep the backend empowered.
Don’t measure too late: Relying only on annual surveys or lagging data means you’re always reacting, and “too late” can seriously hurt when it becomes apparent. Use real-time signals and proactive measurement.
Never treat CX as a one-time fix: Experiences change as products, expectations, and competition evolve, so don’t sit on your laurels. Stay two steps ahead and actively monitor customer response and market “temperature.” Your customers won’t stop, so why should your brand: CX is never “done.”
Overall, CX design is an often-overlooked and frequently misunderstood realm of design, one that actually takes up too large and important a space for it to be “obscure” or confused with something else. Its importance lies in the strategic and practical process of shaping all brand–customer interactions across channels, devices, and time to deliver value, reduce friction, build emotional connection, and earn loyalty: all vital ingredients for a successful brand to exist and persist.
When you successfully bring together UX, service design, marketing, and operations into a seamless, coherent whole, you can perform the “magic” that makes a brand more relevant and “alive” to customers. It may sometimes pose a challenging “formula” to get right, but CX design done well translates to far more than the sum of a brand’s parts: it’s about establishing, and perpetuating, a presence that customers trust and keep returning to.
Find a vast array of essential insights and tips on how to help your brand resonate with people who will love it, in our courses User Research – Methods and Best Practices and Emotional Design — How to Make Products People Will Love.
Enjoy our Master Class How to Design UX That Users Love to Convert Through with Talia Wolf, Founder, GetUplift.
Explore additional insights in the UX Magazine article Customer Experience Is the Future of Design.
Discover further helpful points in the HubSpot article 5 Customer Experience Design Principles from a Barbershop.
Find a wealth of valuable insights in this excellent CXBlog piece: Culture CX: What Do We Do to Change Behaviors?
CX (customer experience) design looks at every touchpoint a person has with a brand, from discovery through support; UX (user experience) design focuses more on how someone interacts with a particular product or interface.
CX design covers emotional perception, branding, service, sales, marketing, policies, and more. UX design, while still large in scope, has focal points on usability, information architecture, visual layout, accessibility, task flows, and error states.
As CX spans multiple channels (digital, physical, human), it demands tighter cross‑department coordination; UX typically lives within product or interface teams (but still branches out to include other stakeholder teams as needed). In practice, UX is a subset of CX: strong UX helps deliver good CX, but CX must also manage what happens outside the interface.
Find a firmer foundation to build upon in our article User Experience and Customer Experience - What’s the Difference?.
Customer experience (CX) encompasses the full journey a customer takes with a brand, everything from awareness, purchase, use, support, to loyalty and advocacy. Customer service is just one component of CX. Customer service refers to the help and support customers receive when they have issues or questions, such as call centers, chat support, and returns.
While great customer service contributes to a positive CX, CX (along with CX design) demands proactive design of every interaction, anticipating needs, reducing friction, and aligning across functions beyond just support. CX is strategic and holistic; customer service tends to be tactical and more reactive.
Get a greater grasp of how brands connect with customers in our article What are Customer Touchpoints & Why Do They Matter?.
Great CX design centers on these principles:
Empathy: deeply understand customer motivations, pain points, and emotions.
Consistency: deliver a coherent experience across all channels.
Simplicity: remove friction and complexity so that interactions feel effortless.
Personalization: Tailor interactions to individual needs and context.
Proactivity: Anticipate issues or next steps before users ask.
Feedback loops: Continuously gather customer input and refine the experience.
Alignment: Ensure internal teams function in harmony so customers encounter a unified brand.
Together, these principles help brands move from functional to delightful experiences that can keep customers happy and loyal.
Consider consistency as one of the leading powers to bake into how your brand accesses users and customers, in our article Consistency: MORE than what you think.
Begin with research: map how customers currently move through your brand across all channels, such as online, in person, support, and delivery.
Identify pain points, gaps, and moments of truth. Then design ideal states (as one coherent journey) from first touch through retention and advocacy. Define key touchpoints, interactions, messaging, handoffs, and policies across teams.
Create service blueprints and experience maps to surface dependencies and backstage systems. Prototype and test segments of the journey, such as onboarding and support handoff. Pilot iteratively, measure impact, and refine.
Secure executive support so all teams can and will commit. Last, but not least, institutionalize the experience by embedding it into processes, training, and metrics.
Delve into service blueprints for essential insights into the interactions customers have with brands.
A typical CX design process tends to follow these stages:
Discovery & research, involving qualitative interviews, quantitative data, stakeholder workshops
Customer journey mapping & current-state mapping
Opportunity identification & priority‑setting (pain points, “wow” moments)
Ideation & concept design across touchpoints
Prototyping & experimentation (mockups, pilots, A/B tests)
Implementation & rollout across systems, teams, and channels
Measurement & governance (key performance indicators (KPIs), feedback, continuous improvement)
You cycle back through steps as you learn and evolve until you deliver, and keep on delivering, the best to your customers.
Keep a handle on KPIs to understand how they count for business and how to make the best of them.
First, translate business goals, such as growth, retention, and cost efficiency, into CX objectives (e.g., reduce churn, increase referral, raise lifetime value). Map how improvements in key experiences can impact those metrics. Use a theory of change or “experience → behavior → business outcome” link.
Engage executives; get CX goals into corporate OKRs (objectives and key results). Align budgets, incentives, and metrics across departments so CX becomes a matter of shared responsibility and everyone’s concern. Ensure stakeholders in marketing, product, operations, and support commit to CX outcomes.
Lastly, monitor business metrics alongside CX metrics, and adjust CX strategy if it doesn’t reinforce business goals.
Explore important insights into how to engage with stakeholders, in this video with Todd Zaki Warfel, Author, Speaker and Leadership Coach.
CX personas represent broader customer roles across a brand’s relationship, not just interactions with a product (although personas in UX design encompass more than just that, too). They emphasize motivations, life context, decision criteria, emotional states, service expectations, brand affinity, and ownership of outcomes.
CX design personas often capture segments across behaviors like purchase frequency, advocacy, support needs, or multi-channel habits. UX design personas focus more on goals in using a product, tasks, pain points in interface interactions, and mental models. CX personas should help teams imagine the full brand relationship, while UX personas help designers optimize individual screens. It’s helpful to use both but tailor each to its scope.
Meet a helpful ally in the form of personas, one of the most important “tools” you might ever hope to apply to designed products and services.
Measure CX via metrics tied to emotional, behavioral, and financial outcomes. Typical metrics include Net Promoter Score (NPS), Customer Satisfaction (CSAT), Customer Effort Score (CES), churn rate / retention, customer lifetime value (CLTV), first response / resolution times, and referral or advocacy rates.
Determine and combine these quantitative metrics with qualitative feedback, such as open comments, and interviews. Track them over time and across journey segments to spot improvement or regression.
Use dashboards to correlate CX metrics with revenue or retention. Embed measurement into experiments and pilots, too. A balanced scorecard approach helps you avoid focusing on metrics that don’t drive real value.
Discover how to find powerful insights to apply to your design process and beyond in our article Customer Lifecycle Mapping - Getting to Grips with Customers.
CX designers collaborate by acting as integrators. With marketing, they define messaging, channels, and onboarding flows; with sales, they design lead handoffs, proposals, and customer expectations; with support, they co‑design control flows, feedback loops, escalation paths, and self‑service.
They run cross‑functional workshops, map handoffs, align language, and surface systemic issues. CX designers help embed design thinking into those teams, help them see how their actions affect overall experience, and create shared metrics. They act as facilitators and advocates to break silos and ensure consistent customer experience across touchpoints so the truth about customers stays in full sight throughout.
Explore additional angles on how to improve your CX design process in our article The Moment of Truth: Build Desirable Relationships with Users and Customers.
CX design and service design overlap heavily: both aim to shape holistic brand experiences and backstage operations (such as systems, policies, and processes) to support those experiences.
Service design uses tools such as service blueprints, systems thinking, and operable design to model how frontstage touchpoints connect with backstage staff, workflows, and resource constraints. CX design defines what experiences customers should see; service design ensures the internal infrastructure and operations can deliver them sustainably. A practical way to view it: CX design often leans more toward customer journey and perception, while service design deals with how the organization actually delivers and supports those journeys.
Secure a stronger grasp of service design to understand further important points about its significance.
Common mistakes CX designers make include:
Designing only for ideal or “happy path” without edge cases or errors
Ignoring internal alignment or failing to engage stakeholders
Having siloed metrics or teams so inconsistencies emerge
Overengineering or adding features rather than simplifying
Neglecting qualitative feedback and relying only on numbers
Not iterating or learning from failures
Treating CX as a project, not a continuous practice to “bake” into the design process and beyond
Neglecting backstage systems, policies, training, or operations
It takes awareness, governance, humility, and continuous iteration to help identify and dodge these problem areas.
Access the area of assumptions to understand how these can also pose threats to good design and how to prevent them from interfering in your design process.
To start, define the persona(s) to journey-map for. Break the journey into phases, such as awareness, consideration, purchase, onboarding, support, and retention. For each phase, list touchpoints, actions, emotions, pain points, and opportunities. Map what your organization already does (the current state) and a future ideal state.
Add backstage elements, such as systems, processes, and policies, and dependencies. Use visual tools (swimlanes and timelines) to show where gaps or friction occur. Validate with customer interviews or feedback. Last, but not least, prioritize where to intervene and iterate over time.
Add essential insights about customer journey maps to boost your skill set and help meet the people who will patronize your brand exactly where you need to.
Becker, L., & Jaakkola, E. (2020). Customer experience: Fundamental premises and implications for research. Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, 48(3), 630–648.
This highly cited review clarifies the conceptual foundations of customer experience (CX) research by identifying four fundamental premises. Becker and Jaakkola contrast two dominant approaches (stimulus-response and process-based perspectives) and offer integrative insights to unify the field. Their work serves as a conceptual anchor, providing a framework to guide consistent theorizing, measurement, and empirical application. Its influence stems from the clarity it brings to a previously fragmented literature, helping scholars and practitioners design more cohesive CX models and methodologies. The article is a vital reference for grounding new research and aligning strategic CX initiatives.
Lipkin, M., & Heinonen, K. (2022). Customer ecosystems: Exploring how ecosystem actors shape customer experience (CX). Journal of Services Marketing, 36(9), 1–17.
Lipkin and Heinonen expand the CX paradigm by showing how various actors within a customer ecosystem, such as social networks, partner firms, and platforms, co-create or disrupt experiences. Using interviews and diaries from wearable technology users, they identify six ecosystem actor roles that form dynamic constellations affecting CX. This article is important because it shifts focus from dyadic firm–customer interactions to broader, interconnected systems, making it essential for CX designers working in digitally-mediated, multi-actor environments. It encourages strategists to account for indirect influences and dependencies, enhancing the realism and robustness of CX design frameworks.
Arkadan, F., Macdonald, E. K., & Wilson, H. N. (2024). Customer experience orientation: Conceptual model, propositions, and research directions. Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, 52, 1560–1584.
This empirical study introduces and formalizes the concept of Customer Experience Orientation (CXO), a value-based, behavior-driven framework that captures how firms strategically embed customer experience practices. The authors identify six key values and associated norms that drive effective CX integration and offer case-based insights into how CXO influences performance and cultural alignment. By linking CX to organizational learning and structure, the paper is crucial for those implementing CX across departments or business units. It bridges the gap between CX strategy and operations, making it especially valuable to CX leaders and transformation teams.
Morgan, B. (2019). The Customer of the Future: 10 Guiding Principles for Winning Tomorrow’s Business. HarperCollins Leadership.
This book is important because it frames CX design in the context of emerging technologies, shifting customer expectations, data ethics, and organizational agility. The author sets out ten guiding principles (e.g., zero friction, transparency, orchestration) to help organizations anticipate evolving customer demands. Morgan emphasizes that a future‑oriented CX is not about isolated touchpoints but about embedding a customer mindset throughout systems and culture. It’s frequently cited in trend analyses of CX and serves as a bridge between strategy, design, and technology.
Bliss, J. (2015). Chief Customer Officer 2.0: How to Build Your Customer‑Driven Growth Engine. Wiley.
Bliss’s book is a core reference for leaders who wish to institutionalize customer centricity. She proposes a five‑competency model (e.g., “Manage customers as assets,” “Align around experience,” “One company accountability”) and gives practical “recipes” for embedding them into product development, governance, metrics, and culture. Her strength lies in connecting executive leadership roles (such as CCOs) with actionable steps to transform organizations. The book is influential because many CX transformations falter at scale, and Bliss addresses the governance, structure, and leadership challenges head on.
Manning, H., & Bodine, K. (2012). Outside In: The Power of Putting Customers at the Center of Your Business. New Harvest / Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
Outside In is a landmark work because it translates years of Forrester’s CX research into a disciplined framework. Manning and Bodine propose six core CX disciplines (strategy, customer understanding, design, measurement, governance, and culture) and stress that CX issues often lie in back‑office functions, not just in customer touchpoints. They introduce the concept of a “customer experience ecosystem,” arguing for systemic thinking beyond frontlines. Its use of case studies across industries makes it a foundational book for both practitioners and strategists in CX design.
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