A beginners guide to customer experience design

In an age where customers expect more than just a product or service, the way they experience your brand can make or break loyalty, advocacy and growth. That’s where Customer Experience (CX) Design comes in.

What is Customer Experience Design?

CX Design is the process of creating an integrated and engaging customer journey. The whole process is based on considering how the customer views your brand before, during and after every interaction. This goes beyond just how an app or website works (User Experience).

CX Design takes a holistic approach that looks at all the touchpoints customers encounter. This includes marketing, sales, service, accessibility, as well as digital and in person experiences.

In practice, it means:

• Mapping and designing every customer touchpoint.

• Designing with the customer’s emotions, expectations, behaviours and needs in mind.

• Making sure the end-to-end journey is coherent and aligned to brand promise.

Why CX Design matters

Customers reward a seamless and enjoyable experience with loyalty and a higher level of brand engagement.

By bringing a customer-centric approach to experience design, you can create amazing experiences that fulfil customer expectations and delight them into coming back, time and time again.

CX Design is not all about external benefits though. The process also helps all parts of your business focus on what customers feel and live through. This fosters an internal alignment that helps your business run smoother.

How to get started on your CX Design journey

Step 1: Establish your design principles

Before jumping into journeys or touchpoints, create guiding principles. These are statements that encapsulate how you want your customers to feel and what your brand promises.

Some examples to get your started:

• We use customer insights and employee feedback to design all of our experiences

• Experiences should feel complete and satisfying

• People should be able to access our experiences, no matter their ability or background

These principles act as a north star while you design, test and refine.

Step 2: Build or refresh your customer personas

Personas are fictional characters, built using research, that represent your key customer groups. They help you think about specific people’s needs, behaviours and emotions rather than “everyone”.

• Gather data about people through interviews, surveys, feedback and analytics

• Ask questions such as

  • "How do they shop"

  • "What channels do they prefer?"

  • "How do they prefer to pay for things?"

Update personas regularly! Personas constantly evolve with your customers.

An example template for a persona

Step 3: Map the customer journey and identify the touchpoints

Once you have your customer personas, you can map the journey they will take with your brand. Start from the point of initial awareness, through to purchase and use, and close off with renewal or exit.

• Capture all of the channels and touchpoints the customer might use

• Identify where customers might feel friction or where there is an opportunity to delight them.

• Capture what customers might feel and think at each step.

A simple customer journey map

Step 4: Design for emotions

Great customer experience is not just about ease of use, it also taps into people's emotions. Depending on what your organisation does, this might range from relief at finding the product they have been looking for, through to fear of needing to engage your services.

• Use empathy maps to understand feelings, motivations and thoughts.

• Ask: What are their emotional needs? What do they worry about? What delights them?

• Design interactions that fulfil those emotions, not just functional needs.

An empathy map

Step 5: Ensure the organisation is aligned

A great design or amazing customer experience in one area of an organisation can be undone if the experience is not consistent across all channels and touchpoints. The entire organisation must be CX Design oriented and customer focused.

• Make sure all channels (social, phone, web, in person) deliver consistent experience.

• Share design principles, personas and journey-maps with all functions.

• Empower teams with insights and tools so they can deliver aligned experiences.

Step 6: Test and iterate

CX Design and customer-centricity is not a once-off project that ends on launch day. It is a continuous cycle of feedback and optimisation.

• Your design will need to include a definition of success and ways to measure this.

• Test your designs and service changes through in field pilots, surveys and direct customer engagement.

• Continue to gather feedback from customers and staff post launch to see how customers respond.

• Continually improve and iterate as customer needs, channels and technology evolves.

Beginners Tips

• Start with one journey: Choose a high-impact journey (e.g., onboarding) and redesign it fully rather than trying to fix everything at once.

• Engage real customers and frontline staff: They spot friction you miss.

• Keep it simple: Get the basics (clarity, ease, consistency, accessibility) right first.

• Use the data you have: Even simple feedback or analytics help you discover pain points.

• Document and communicate: Share your work broadly within the organisation, so everyone understands the goals.

• Celebrate the wins: Build momentum and support by showing how your design work improved a metric or customer sentiment.