Lifecycle maps are high-level customer experience overviews that designers create to gain a holistic view of customers’ relationships with brands and to understand the purpose of each step to design for in the cycle. Charting the lifecycle from brand awareness onward, these serve as zoomed-out guides that can reveal vital insights.
“Whenever an organization makes the transition from one lifecycle stage to the next, difficulties arise.”
— Ichak Adizes, Business consultant and developer of the Corporate Life Cycle Model
See how lifecycle maps can help you guide how your brand reaches, impresses and retains customers:
The relationships people have with brands resemble the lifecycle as envisioned by Ichak Adizes, who developed the model for corporations to track their own development. Essentially, this lifecycle is a peak-shaped curve with the following points that correspond to the human lifecycle: Birth, Infant, Teen, Growth, Prime, Retirement and Death. In service design, these points represent where your users—who, hopefully, convert to remain as loyal customers—are during their user journeys with your service.
Lifecycle maps are different deliverables from customer journey maps. Journey maps offer more detailed views of (e.g.) customer pain points at the various touchpoints they encounter on their way to getting what they want from your service. Lifecycle maps complement journey maps, and can provide a vital vantage point when you’re trying to design for the many variables that will decide if your customers fall in love with your service.
More precisely, lifecycle maps can help you:
Get inside your target market’s minds while keeping an eye on the big picture during—what can be—long and complex journeys. Since service design is all about omnichannel and aiming to design the best experiences for customers as they switch between channels and touchpoints, you’ll need to plan for the pitfalls and opportunities that arise as people interact with your service digitally (e.g., placing orders on their phones) and physically (e.g., receiving these at a store).
Spot disconnects in the customer lifecycle. For example, your service might accommodate users who love coffee and let them easily collect points they can use to buy other goods, perhaps even including some gamification aspects. But what happens, for example, when a user dies? Can their loved ones deactivate the account? What happens to their points?
Understand the customer experience holistically – so you have a guide that shows your team and stakeholders how the various steps combine to make the customer experience overall and leave lasting impressions.
© Frank Spillers and Experience Dynamics, adapted from Ichak Adizes, CC BY-NC-SA 3.0
Create these from your user research as zoomed-out views of where your customers are throughout the timeline from when they learn about, decide to become involved with and onward until they leave your brand. You’ll need to develop a solid understanding of your target service users (distilled as personas), what they stand to gain and lose (i.e., experience as pain points) and the value you can bring them.
Structure your map around the question “What is the customer doing (or trying to) at this stage of the lifecycle?” so you can envision the following:
Birth – You advertise (e.g., on social media) to prospective customers, who have a problem to solve or a need to fulfill.
Infant – You get them to start considering what your service offers. However, in their research they’ll also look at the solutions that other brands offer.
Teen – You manage to convince them to engage with your brand by making a commitment (e.g., they sign up for your health-promoting app).
Growth – You get them to start using your service as customers (e.g., they collect points by logging workout hours at participating gyms to use towards healthy meals at participating restaurants).
Prime – You make them (at least) satisfied or (hopefully) fall in love with your service. As they become more familiar with it and appreciate the results (e.g., they’re in better shape), they’ll start to turn into loyal customers.
Retirement – You retain these customers and continue to make them feel valued over time. They might start buying other services or items your brand offers since they trust it so much.
Death – They leave your service, ideally because it’s solved their problem, got them what or where they want and left them with deep positive impressions. They’re likely to buy from you again if the need arises.
Tips
Keep an eye on the risks at every stage: early “death” (i.e., churn) can cost you many customers long before the Death stage.
Retention is just as important as acquisition, so beware of what happens after the Prime stage as momentum might decay into disenchantment.
Overall, lifecycle maps should help you design how best to transition your customers from one lifecycle stage to the next. Remember to think beyond the series of tasks and objectives and aim higher, to accommodate customers at an emotional level throughout their relationship with your brand and the many turns and climbs on the way.
© Karen Yunqiu LI, Fair use
Take our Service Design course, which includes a lifecycle map template.
This blog from a senior design researcher and UX lead in the BBC explores helpful insights about lifecycle mapping.
Read this for useful insights into how lifecycle maps differ from journey maps.
You should use a lifecycle map to understand how users move through long-term relationships with your product—from initial awareness to loyalty and advocacy. This high-level tool reveals recurring patterns, disengagement risks, and emotional states throughout the full lifecycle—not just individual interactions. It guides design decisions toward improving retention, reengagement, and even reactivation strategies.
Lifecycle mapping aligns UX design with business strategy by showing how design influences customer evolution over time. Used well, lifecycle maps help balance emotional resonance with practical stages like awareness, purchase, and exit, helping create deeper, more sustainable user relationships.
Discover essential points in our article Creating Brand or Product Awareness and the User Experience.
A lifecycle map captures the big-picture flow of user relationships across stages like awareness, consideration, loyalty, and exit. It helps organizations understand long-term dynamics and retention strategies.
On the other hand, a user journey map drills into specific touchpoints or tasks, highlighting user actions, emotions, pain points, and motivations in detail. Lifecycle maps offer a broader strategy view, while journey maps track detailed interactions. Mapping both ensures strategic clarity (lifecycle) and tactical empathy (journey). While lifecycle maps outline stage progression, journey maps capture the intimate steps users take within each stage—two vital canvases to have in strategy and design.
Enjoy our Master Class How to Create Actionable User Journey Maps with Kelly Jura, Vice-President, Brand & User Experience at ScreenPal for a deep dive into journey mapping.
A typical user lifecycle map includes these high-level stages: Awareness (first encountering your brand), Consideration (exploring options), Selection or Purchase, Product Experience (using or learning), Loyalty, Advocacy, and Exit (churn or end of relationship).
Some models add engagement or “raving fan” phases to illustrate enthusiastic users. These stages often loop rather than flow linearly, since users can move back and forth. Mapping them helps you design at each touchpoint to nurture users instead of merely attracting them.
Explore additional helpful insights in our article Customer Lifecycle Mapping - Getting to Grips with Customers.
You want to include stage names (Awareness through Exit), typical user actions in each stage, and key emotional or engagement states. Add touchpoint categories or channels (ads, support, product experience). Highlight retention risks and “moment of truth” opportunities that drive loyalty or churn.
Layer in metrics like conversion or drop-off rates, plus notes on customer goals or expectations. Lifecycle maps work strategically, so clarity and emotional resonance matter more than granular detail for this UX strategy deliverable.
Speaking of strategy, explore important big-picture aspects and more in our article What Does a UX Strategist Do?.
To begin, gather data from research, analytics, and stakeholder insights to define lifecycle stages. Next, outline the purpose of each stage (such as Awareness or Loyalty). Then, note the mindset or emotional state of the user in each. Add high-level actions and interactions without diving into step-by-step tasks.
Highlight drop-off points or opportunities to delight. Present a visual map showing loops and progression over time. Last, but not least, validate with data or interviews, then use it to inform design decisions and strategic planning.
Get deep into user research to explore how it helps design teams fine-tune better designs.
First, review customer data—conversion rates, churn metrics, engagement timelines. Next, conduct qualitative research, such as interviews or surveys, to capture user motivations and emotional states at different stages.
Analyze touchpoint data across channels. Combine analytics with user stories to uncover patterns—when users disengage, switch to another product, or promote your brand. These insights can anchor your lifecycle stages in real behavior, not assumptions.
Discover what assumptions can look like, how hard they can be to spot, and why challenging them is vital to ensure effective designs that truly benefit users.
Lifecycle maps highlight where users drop off or feel frustrated. When you link those moments to stages, you can prioritize features that enhance emotional resonance and retention. They could be onboarding improvements, loyalty rewards, re-engagement nudges—whatever helps engage users.
That strategic prioritization shows which actions strengthen relationships across the lifecycle—prime chances to boost both UX and business value as users get what they want and your brand knows they want it.
Find helpful insights about feature prioritization so you can help your brand put the best foot forward in the right direction.
Lifecycle maps inform product strategy by pinpointing stages where users struggle or disengage. You can plan roadmap items that strengthen loyalty (like retention features), improve advocacy (social sharing tools), or ease reactivation.
This strategic view gives you the altitude to see what is really going on and ensures your roadmap aligns with the full user lifecycle, not just early adoption or onboarding.
Gain important insights about strategy, roadmapping, and more when you dive deep into product management.
Update your lifecycle map monthly or quarterly, especially when you release major features, see shifting metrics, or learn new user insights. With digital products, things can move fast; it takes proactive and dedicated monitoring to keep a responsible finger on the pulse.
Unsurprisingly, lifecycle dynamics evolve, so keeping your map fresh ensures continued strategic relevance and keeps your team aligned with real user behavior. Frequent check-ins can pay dividends in terms of knowing what went right and what might need fixing.
Explore important aspects of user behavior so you can tailor more effective solutions to the people who use the products or services of your brand.
UMA Technology. (2025, June 20). Beyond the Basics of Customer Lifecycle Mapping Platforms for Usage-Based SaaS. UMA Technology. Retrieved from https://umatechnology.org/beyond-the-basics-of-customer-lifecycle-mapping-platforms-for-usage-based-saas/
This article contextualizes lifecycle maps within usage-based SaaS environments, where customer value evolves dynamically over time. It explains how designers and product teams can integrate behavioral analytics, predictive modeling, segmentation, and CRM data to predict churn and tailor re-engagement strategies. The focus on usage-based products adds a fresh strategic dimension to traditional lifecycle mapping—highlighting onboarding, pricing, and retention as high-stakes touchpoints. For UX designers working with subscription or metered services, this article offers tangible tactics for enhancing long-term user relationships through data-informed mapping.
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