CASE STUDY
End-to-End Journey Framework & Customer Journey Mapping
Bringing Together Customer and Associate Experiences to Reframe Omni-Channel Decisions.
Domain: Enterprise Service Design (B2E)
Timeline: Ongoing
Role: Lead UX Designer & Strategist
Process Phase: Translate
OVERVIEW
A shared in-store journey framework and foundational maps revolutionized strategic planning for greater impact.
Siloed teams lacked a shared, end‑to‑end view of the in‑store customer journey, leading to fragmented decisions and broken omni‑channel experiences. The opportunity was to create a scalable way to connect customer behavior with associate interactions and store operations to form a single source of truth.
Role: Lead UX Designer & Strategist. Introduced journey mapping as organizational infrastructure. Defined the journey framework, led cross‑functional synthesis, and guided the creation of the organization’s first end‑to‑end in‑store journeys across five brands.
Impact: Connected customers, associates, and operations through a scalable journey framework and layered maps that reveal omni-channel friction, opportunities, and strategic insights enabling teams to make informed experience decisions across the ecosystem.
Solution: Delivered a flexible journey framework and layered journey maps, from macro end‑to‑end grocery trips to more detailed shopping flows, with an embedded service blueprint and linked Nexus persona profiles for richer context. The maps visualize behaviors, emotions, touch points, metrics, and operational dependencies, all strategically designed at mid‑fidelity to evolve over time and support various use cases.
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A structured model defining how journeys should be mapped across multiple levels of detail.
The framework establishes
A consistent journey hierarchy
A repeatable structure for standardized mapping
Impact
Created a scalable foundation for journey mapping enabling teams to explore experiences consistently across the organization.
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A high-level map captures the full in-store grocery journey from arrival through departure.
The map visualizes
Major journey phases & steps
Storyboard
Emotional highs and lows
Customer pains and opportunities
Customer Touchpoints
Metrics/KPI’s
What If (for capturing “unhappy paths” and journey pivots)
Impact
Provides the organization’s first holistic view of the end-to-end in-store experience revealing systemic friction points and opportunities across the high-level customer journey.
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A deeper exploration of the shopping portion of the journey focused on selecting products within the store’s perimeter and center aisles.
The map details
Shop specific journey phases & steps
Storyboard
Emotional highs and lows
Customer pains and opportunities
Customer touchpoints
Metrics/KPI’s
What If (for capturing “unhappy paths” and journey pivots)
Impact
Provides more intricate behavioral insights and strategic opportunities within specific store departments and aisles.
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Each journey map incorporates a lightweight service blueprint layer that captures how internal store operations and associates support the customer experience.
This includes
Frontstage associate interactions
Backstage operational activities
Supporting tools and processes
Retail associate personas from the Nexus persona ecosystem were plotted directly onto the maps, allowing users to “double-click” into persona profiles and analyze how specific associate roles contribute to different stages of the journey.
Impact
Connected customer and employee experiences within the same artifact reveal how internal workflows shape the overall experience.
L1 End-to-End Customer Journey Map Storyboard & Emotion Arc
L1 End-to-End Customer Journey Map Pains, Opportunities, Touchpoints, Metrics & What If
L2 Shop Customer Journey Map Storyboard & Emotion Arc
L2 End-to-End Customer Journey Map Pains, Opportunities, Touchpoints, Metrics & What If
Embedded Service Blueprint Layer
End-to-End and Shop Journey Maps
Journey Framework
Continue the journey by reading these related case studies.
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Reveal: Nexus Persona Ecosystem
Personas show who does the work.
Nexus personas were embedded in customer journey maps, giving teams rich, holistic customer and associate context.
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Create: In-Store Item Management
UX brings it to life.
Journey map insights informed prioritization and design requirements for a legacy system redesign for in-store inventory operations.
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Enable: Executive Visioning Workshop
DesignOps makes it scale.
Journey map insights informed an executive workshop that aligned executives on a common path forward for automated in-store pricing.