We often design customer journeys like railway systems — assuming customers move from awareness to consideration to purchase in clean, logical stages. But in reality, customer behaviour flows more like a river — shaped by context, emotion, and invisible currents.
At the design table, customer experiences (CX) are structured, linear, predictable. In theory, customers board at Awareness Station, stop briefly at Consideration Junction, and disembark neatly at Purchase Terminal. It’s a comforting model — clear, measurable, controllable.
But real customer behaviour doesn’t follow tracks.
It flows like a river — shaped by invisible currents of emotion, fragmented attention, shifting needs, and environmental nudges. Some customers drift aimlessly until something stirs them to paddle. Others plunge in actively, then change course midstream. Their journey is rarely clean or conscious. And it almost never looks like the funnel on your whiteboard.
If we want to design for how people actually behave, we need to stop laying tracks — and start learning how to read the river.
When most CX strategies assume a “buyer’s journey,” they also assume the buyer is on the move — searching, comparing, narrowing down options. This is the active search phase: the customer is aware of a need and intentionally gathering information to solve it.
But this only tells part of the story.
In reality, a huge portion of customer behaviour takes place in the passive phase — where the customer isn’t looking. Not yet. Maybe they don’t feel a need. Maybe they’re distracted. Maybe they’d care if you could get their attention — but right now, the current hasn’t moved them.
Think of it like this:
Most brands only design for the paddlers — and miss the massive behavioural opportunity in those who drift. In 2021, Professor John Dawes of the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute introduced the 95:5 rule that up to 95% of people or firms are not in the market for many goods and services at any one time.
Customers don’t move into active search just because a need exists — they move because something triggers salience. It might be a social cue, a memory, a contextual event (e.g., a broken phone, an ad, a friend’s recommendation). That means your role isn’t just to meet demand — it's to spark it.
Most journey maps begin at “awareness.” You’ll gain more insight by mapping what happens before awareness — the passive, pre-search states.
Customers in passive mode don’t want a buying pitch. They want relevance, surprise, familiarity — something that makes them paddle on their own. Use content, prompts, and nudges that are low-friction and emotionally resonant. Don’t ask passive users to compare features — give them a feeling, an image, a hook so you can get their attention first.
A customer doesn’t go searching for a new mattress until they have a sore back, or they stay at a hotel with one that feels amazing. Until then? They’re floating. A smart brand doesn't wait until search — it plants the idea upstream: “Are you sleeping as well as you could be?”
In his book Thinking, Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman proposes that the human mind operates through two systems of thinking:
System 1 – Fast, automatic, emotional
System 1 is the “autopilot” — it's fast, efficient, but prone to bias.
System 2 – Slow, deliberate, analytical
System 2 is the “pilot” — slow but capable of deep reasoning and restraint.
System 1 runs the show by default. System 2 mostly steps in to justify, correct, or rationalise decisions made by System 1 — after the fact. So people make emotional, intuitive choices of purchase, then back them up with reasons that feel logical.
Kahneman’s System 1 and 2 framework helps CX professionals realise:
You are not designing only for what customers think — you’re designing for how they think.
In most real-world scenarios, System 1 dominates, which is why ease, emotion, and default behaviours win — even when customers claim to act logically.
So to interact with the potential customer, attention is the gatekeeper. That’s what you need to aim at. Modern CX isn’t lost because of bad products or broken journeys — it’s lost in tiny moments where the customer’s attention drifts, gets snapped elsewhere, or never fully lands. These micro-moments — fleeting, often subconscious — are where customer behaviour is shaped most powerfully.
Attention isn't a faucet. It's a spark — brief, emotional, and situational.
Imagine the customer as a boat drifting or paddling downstream. A branch floating by, a change in current, or a flash of sunlight on the riverbank can cause a tiny, reflexive adjustment — maybe they pause, turn slightly, or look in a new direction.
That’s why micro-moments matter: a notification, a line of copy that resonates, an unexpected friction point, a well-timed suggestion or visual cue. Alone, they may seem minor. But collectively, they steer the journey — or stop it altogether.
Cognitive load is high; attention is scarce. People don’t evaluate options deeply unless something makes them pause. Emotions guide System 1 decisions. Small cues like tone, color, familiarity, or urgency affect how a moment feels — which affects what happens next. Framing and timing determine salience. The same message at the wrong time is ignored. At the right moment, it becomes magnetic.
In micro-moments, people don’t think. They react.
Design for the moment, not the journey: anticipate decision points: know where attention is likely to peak or wane — and what customers need in that second. Simplify next steps. When attention is high, make action effortless. When it’s low, reduce friction even further. Use behavioural triggers: defaults, social proof, loss aversion, surprise — tools that activate the reflexive brain.
One of the great illusions in customer research is the idea that people know what they want — or why they made a choice. As David Ogilvy put it: “The trouble with market research is that people don't think what they feel, they don't say what they think and they don't do what they say.”
Surveys, interviews, and customer feedback forms are often treated as gospel. But more often than not, they capture something else entirely: a narrative, not a decision. System 2 (slow thinking) kicks in to explain a decision — but System 1 (fast, intuitive thinking) often made the decision in the first place. So it might make sense that Apple has no market research department, yet they are thought to be pretty user centric.
What customers say is shaped by memory, emotion, social pressure, and storytelling.
What they do is shaped by context, friction, attention, and unconscious patterns.
Imagine asking someone who just floated down a winding river how they got to their destination. They’ll mention the big turns — maybe a fork they remember choosing — but they’ll miss the tiny currents, eddies, and subtle pulls that shaped most of their path. That’s how customer self-reporting works: reconstruction, not recollection.
When you ask a customer, “Why did you choose us?”, they give you a rational story, not a behavioural truth. This isn’t lying — it’s just how the mind works. It makes meaning after the fact. The most honest feedback is always the action.
This is why behaviour — not stated preference — should be your primary source of insight.
E.g. a customer gives your app 5 stars but never opens it again.
So move from asking, “What do our customers want?” to: “What do our customers do, even when they say something else?” Design from observation, not only interpretation.
In real life, customers don’t move through journeys — they glide, stall, react, and drift. It’s not a plan. It’s a path shaped by conditions they barely notice.
If we want to improve CX, we need to stop building smooth tracks and start noticing where the river turns — sometimes sharply, sometimes imperceptibly — and design for those moments.
You shall understand who is present at all, how they are driven sub-consciously, and focus on the concrete actions they carry out.
