Design Should Connect the Whole Customer Experience

Peter Merholz believes design should help a company's services work well together. He calls this coherence: the whole experience makes sense to the customer. This means looking beyond a single screen, product, or team. A person may use several services to finish one task. Those services need to feel connected, not just easy to use separately.

Consider banking or health care, where people often move between different channels. They may use a website, a mobile app, and a phone service. Each part can work well on its own but still create confusion. Customers may not know where to start or may enter information repeatedly. The company may then see more people leave and more support calls.

Merholz says product managers often focus on their own products and targets. This can make it harder to see the complete customer journey. Design can bring a different view because designers study people's behavior and needs. Their work can connect services across team boundaries. It should cover more than matching colors, buttons, or other visual details.

The article describes a media company example discussed by McKinsey in 2016. Four touchpoints received scores of 90%, 85%, 85%, and 90%. But the full journey received a score of 60%. Good individual parts did not add up to a good whole. Merholz uses this example to explain why companies need someone to address the connections.

However, saying design owns coherence does not settle every question about responsibility. Merholz asks which decisions designers should make and what evidence should support them. A high abandonment rate can have several causes, including expensive shipping. Other teams may also claim responsibility for the journey. His proposal is a starting point for discussion, not a complete answer about how companies should organize.