Customer experience is mostly the boring parts done properly

People rarely comment on the parts of an experience that were designed most carefully. They notice the delivery date being wrong, the returns process taking three emails, the search that doesn't find the thing they can see in the shop.

At Thomas Cook I spent a lot of time on discovery-to-booking journeys across multiple brands and markets. The interesting work was almost never the hero moment. It was the point where somebody had nearly decided and something small stopped them.

I think that's the useful lens. Find the places where intent already exists and something in the way we have built things is getting in the way of it.

Before I built the research function at Selfridges, most of what we believed about customers came from a mix of analytics, occasional studies and confident opinion. It wasn't wrong exactly, it was just thin.

Setting up the function meant deciding what we would ask, how often, and who got to see the answers. Getting from around three studies a year to weekly testing changed the culture more than it changed any single design.

Once teams can watch a customer struggle on a Tuesday and change something by Friday, arguments about taste get shorter. That was probably the biggest benefit, and it wasn't the one I'd planned for.

At Springer Nature I worked on scientific publishing products used globally by researchers. The subject matter was genuinely complicated and the users were experts, so simplifying meant something quite specific.

It wasn't about removing things. It was closer to sequencing: deciding what somebody needs at each point and being disciplined about not showing them everything at once.

That period taught me to be careful with the word simple. Plenty of experiences that look clean are simply hiding the difficulty somewhere the customer will meet it later, usually at the worst possible moment.

Customer experience falls apart at the seams between teams. Content, product, technology, merchandising and service all own a piece, and the customer meets all of it as one thing.

Part of my role at Selfridges covered UX, digital design and content management together, which helped, because a lot of the seams were inside my own remit rather than across a negotiation.

At JoyBuy the seams are geographic as well, with an organisation spanning London and Beijing. Getting a consistent experience out of that takes more written-down agreement and fewer corridor conversations than I was used to, and I'm still adjusting to it.