Designing Experiences That Work: Improving How People Interact with Your Organisation

Experience is often described as something people feel. In practice, it is something people live through every day.

Employees experience it when they submit a request and wait for a response.

Customers experience it when they ask for help and don’t know what will happen next.

Managers experience it when work slows down for reasons no one can clearly explain.

In most organisations, experience issues don’t come from bad intent or poor service culture. They come from unclear processes, fragmented ownership, and workflows that evolved without being designed.

Improving experience, therefore, is not about polish. It is about removing friction from how work actually gets done.

“Great experiences don’t happen by accident. They are intentionally designed.”

- Don Norman

Why Experience Problems Are Hard to See

One of the reasons experience issues persist is that they are rarely visible in isolation. No single team “owns” the experience end to end.

Instead, experience breaks down quietly:

• between departments,

• across handovers,

• during approvals,

• when expectations are unclear.

Each step might make sense on its own. The frustration appears only when someone moves through the entire journey.

Common signs of experience friction

• Requests that bounce between teams

• Customers repeating the same information

• Employees unsure who owns the next step

• Long response times with no visibility

• Processes that technically work, but feel exhausting

When organisations look at performance only through functional KPIs, these issues remain hidden. Experience requires a cross-functional view.

Experience Is the Flow of Work, Not Just the Touchpoints

Many experience initiatives focus on individual moments: a form, a screen, a response email, a support interaction.

Those matter, but they are not enough.

Real experience is shaped by:

• how work flows across teams,

• how decisions are made,

• how delays are handled,

• how predictable outcomes feel.

If the underlying workflow is unclear, even well-designed touchpoints will feel frustrating.

This is why experience improvement must start with understanding how work actually moves through the organisation today, not how it is supposed to move on paper.

Understanding the Current Experience (Before Redesigning It)

Before changing anything, it’s critical to build a shared picture of the current experience.

At Cognigate, this usually involves:

• interviews with people doing the work,

• journey mapping across departments,

• reviewing real requests and cases,

• identifying handovers, delays, and rework loops.

The goal is not to document everything.

The goal is to identify where clarity breaks down.

Questions that reveal experience gaps

• Where do requests typically slow down?

• Where does ownership become unclear?

• Which steps require follow-ups or escalation?

• Where do people feel they are “waiting in the dark”?

These moments define the experience far more than surface-level design.

Redesigning Journeys for Clarity, Not Complexity

Once friction points are visible, redesign becomes much more practical.

Effective experience redesign focuses on:

• reducing unnecessary steps,

• clarifying ownership at each stage,

• setting clear expectations,

• shortening feedback loops.

This does not mean removing governance or control.

It means making governance visible and predictable.

What well-designed journeys have in common

• One clear entry point

• Clear ownership at every stage

• Defined response and resolution expectations

• Transparent status visibility

• Simple escalation paths

When people know what will happen next and who is responsible, effort drops and trust increases.

Internal Experience Shapes External Experience

One of the most overlooked truths in experience work is this:

Organisations cannot consistently deliver a good external experience if the internal experience is broken.

Employees who navigate unclear processes, conflicting priorities, or constant workarounds will eventually pass that friction on to customers, even if unintentionally.

Improving internal experience:

• reduces stress and rework,

• improves service consistency,

• increases confidence in delivery,

• creates capacity for better customer outcomes.

This is why experience work should not be treated as a “design initiative.”

It is an operational improvement effort with very human consequences.

What Changes When Experience Is Designed Properly

When experience is approached systematically, several shifts tend to happen:

1) Work flows more smoothly

Fewer handovers, fewer follow-ups, fewer “who owns this?” moments.

2) Response times become more predictable

Not necessarily faster in every case, but clearer and more reliable.

3) Conversations improve

Less chasing, more problem-solving.

4) Trust increases

People trust the process because it behaves consistently.

5) Experience becomes scalable

Good experience is no longer dependent on individuals “going the extra mile.”

Practical Takeaway

Experience improves when clarity replaces assumption.

The organisations that deliver consistently good experiences are not the ones with the most polished interfaces. They are the ones that:

• understand how work actually flows,

• design journeys across teams, not silos,

• make ownership and expectations explicit,

• and remove friction before it becomes visible frustration.

Experience, at its core, is the result of good operational design.