Nearly every financial institution has adapted language around putting customer experience at the heart of what they do. Yet few have captured the benefits they anticipated would accompany this change.

Researchers and designers have been hired to sit alongside product and digital leads. Agile methodologies have been adopted, reformatted, and readopted.

But where are the meaningful outcomes? And if they haven’t arrived, why not?

The disconnect between stated intentions and actual results stems from a misunderstanding of how customer experience design integrates with product delivery. Many organizations struggle to integrate research and design into their delivery motion, limiting their ability to achieve their objectives.

The Gap Between Intention and Implementation

Despite good intentions, many companies fail to see the results they expect from their experience design initiatives, even with the right talent in place.

Consider this scenario: A research team is engaged in a project to deliver an updated mobile experience. However, the timelines are so compressed that no user research can inform the updates. The resulting experience isn’t driven by end-user understanding but by project deadlines and assumptions.

This happens more often than you might think. Even when research and design teams exist within an organization, they’re often excluded from the process of understanding needs, creating solutions, and validating designs.

The engagement is reactive rather than proactive, siloed rather than collaborative.

Overcoming Barriers in Experience Design Strategy

The first barrier to effective integration often occurs at the strategic level.

Misaligned Objectives

Organizations often frame business and user objectives separately, creating an artificial competition between them.

Consider these two objective statements:

• Business-only objective: “Increase new customer accounts by 20% in Q1.”
• Integrated objective: “Improve the onboarding experience for new customers to drive higher engagement and revenue.”

The first focuses solely on a business metric. The second recognizes that only by focusing on the customer experience do business goals become achievable.

Short-Term Funding Models

Another barrier in experience design strategy is how projects are funded.

When funding is allocated on a project-by-project basis rather than aligned to longer-term themes or objectives, the result is often short-sighted decision-making.

Project-based funding often forces research and design work to be compressed or eliminated to meet short-term deadlines, leading to poor outcomes. Teams focus on completing the project within constraints rather than solving the right problems.

Organizational Models for Experience Design

How teams are organized and incentivized plays an important role in their effectiveness. Are they siloed with different objectives, or is the environment set up for collaboration with aligned goals?

While there’s no one-size-fits-all solution, these three common organizational models each offer advantages and challenges:

Center of Excellence Model

In this model, research and experience design functions operate as centers of excellence focused on their craft. They essentially serve as internal service organizations to business units.

Pros:

• Maintains consistent standards across the business
• Allows specialists to hone their craft and skills
• Creates efficiency through standardization

Cons:

• When isolated from business problems, teams become disconnected from user needs
• May lead to a service-provider mentality rather than true partnership

Opportunity: If choosing this model, create an engagement framework that allows design and research teams to embed within business units for extended periods. This approach enables them to become collaborative team members rather than being pulled in multiple directions across different projects.

Embedded Model

In this approach, research and design functions live directly within business units or focused around opportunity areas.

Pros:

• Teams stay connected to user and business challenges
• Greater alignment with business goals
• Deeper subject matter expertise

Cons:

• Resources can get spread too thin across many areas
• May lead to redundancy and inefficiency
• Difficult to maintain consistent practices

Opportunity: Group thematically similar user segments and problem statements to avoid resource proliferation while maintaining the right level of understanding and coverage.

Dual-Track Model

This approach creates two groups of resources: one focused on evaluating new concepts and opportunities, the other on delivery.

Pros:

• Proactively identifies opportunities beyond the immediate horizon
• Balances innovation with execution
• Creates space for longer-term thinking

Cons:

• Can become difficult to orchestrate these parallel tracks
• Challenges in managing the ratio between innovation and delivery
• Risk of disconnection between teams

Opportunity: Thematically balance the ratios so insights benefit multiple areas. Focus on creating strong feedback loops between innovation and delivery teams.

Implementing Business Design Strategy Through Experience Design

Regardless of which experience design strategy you choose, success looks like collaborative teams interacting with users across the entire product delivery lifecycle.

While methodologies differ, most experience design strategies follow these four general phases:

Discovery Phase

Research with impacted users develops an understanding of their needs and how new solutions can achieve their objectives.

This early engagement helps identify the right problems to solve through effective business design strategy.

Define Phase

Teams collaborate to articulate solutions that meet both user and business needs, validating these concepts with end users.

This collaboration ensures alignment between what users want and what the business needs.

Design Phase

Low-cost solutions are tested with users to refine for effectiveness before significant development resources are committed.

This iterative approach de-risks delivery by ensuring designs solve the right problems.

Deliver Phase

Teams package and confirm iterative value delivery with users, effectively communicating the timing, intent, and “how-to” around each progressive step. Continued user involvement ensures the final product matches expectations.

Including users in each stage reduces biases delivery teams naturally develop. This consistent validation de-risks delivery by ensuring what’s built actually meets user needs.

Designing Customer Experience Without Analysis Paralysis

If you’re afraid that extensive user involvement might slow down your process, rest assured that properly structured research actually accelerates delivery. It reduces rework and ensures products meet actual user needs.

To avoid analysis paralysis while still incorporating user feedback:

1. Frame research in the context of decisions. Ask, “What will we do differently if we conduct this research? What do we need to understand to make that decision?”
2. Understand the lead time required for insights. Different types of research require different timelines to inform decision-making. Work backward from decision points to plan appropriate experience design research activities.
3. Focus on the right questions at the right time. Not all research is created equal. Match the depth and breadth of your research activities to the decisions at hand.
4. Prioritize based on risk. Focus research efforts on the areas of greatest uncertainty and risk to maximize your experience design strategy’s impact.

This structured approach to research helps you avoid unnecessary and sprawling investigations while still gathering the insights you need to make informed decisions.

Effective Business Design Strategy Going Forward

Integrating experience design into delivery processes isn’t a nice-to-have — it’s an imperative. Organizations that bridge this gap outperform their competitors in customer satisfaction, product adoption, and business results.

It’s not enough to have the right people. You must also cultivate the right structures, processes, and mindsets to integrate research and experience design throughout the delivery lifecycle. This integration de-risks product development and leads to better business outcomes.

By addressing both strategic and organizational barriers, companies enjoy the full potential of their experience design investments and deliver products that meet user needs and achieve business objectives.