Creating the ideal customer journey

Creating competitive advantage through excellent user experience is tough for a number of reasons. One of the most significant is the challenge of creating buy-in from your organisation. To effect meaningful change you often need support across several organisational ‘silos’ like IT, Marketing, Customer Services and Product owners. But how do you do it?

One approach we’re using is to develop an Ideal Customer Journey. This is a prototype of a user experience which is uncompromisingly aligned to customer needs and preferences – and deliberately rides roughshod over current technical, commercial and product constraints.

The principle is the same as developing a concept car. The intention is not to create something which can immediately roll into production, but instead it challenges the status quo and focuses the organisation on the need for change and the potential for innovation. An Ideal Customer Journey creates a vision of the future and gets the organisation thinking and talking about ways to solve problems to serve customers.

So what’s involved?

• Insight: you need a very deep understanding of your target customer, your marketplace and your competitors in order to start the process. What are the pain points for customers in the current experience?
• Design principles: Turn your understanding of customer needs into a set of precise and inspiring principles your design process will follow
• Ideas: Use your design principles as the starting point for creative thinking. Are there new ways to solve old problems?
• Sketches: Start to shape your ideal journey through concept descriptions and visualisations (This is a good time to check back with customers through user research – how well do they think you’re doing against your design principles?)
• Prototype: Produce a shiny working prototype to give your organisation a stirring (maybe a tiny bit scary) vision of how things could be
• Negotiate: OK, we can’t build or support all of this today. But actually there are some clever ideas here. Maybe we should start working on some of this stuff straight away…

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