The Journey is the Story
Emotion, Meaning, and Memory in CX and Experience Design
By Pontus Wärnestål
Deputy Professor, Halmstad University · Designer, Ambition Group ·
Guest teacher, Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design (MOME)
Journey management has become a central discipline in Customer Experience (CX) — mapping, measuring, and orchestrating customer interactions across time and touchpoints. Yet many journey frameworks stop at process and data. They optimize what can be measured, not necessarily what can be felt.
It is ironic that the design profession keeps pretending there is a rational set of metrics in a spreadsheet that will make executives and customers fall in love with our work. There isn’t. There never was. What moves people — especially when the stakes are high — is a feeling that later gets dressed up as a reason. Psychologists have known this for a long time, and the design community actually knows this deep down as well… We simply lose our nerve about it sometimes — especially when the stakes are high.
Designers and CX leaders often sense the gap: a journey may be efficient, but not memorable. It may meet expectations, but not move people. The missing ingredient is story — not as metaphor, but as structure. Story provides the grammar of human experience: motive, emotion, conflict, anticipation, and resolution. It is how people make sense of what happens to them — including brand interactions.
Storytelling and Rationality
Ellen Lupton frames design as storytelling. Not just metaphorically — but structurally. Designers create (sometimes unknowingly) characters, goals, conflicts, risk, and resolution. They point attention and shape meaning through the careful choreography of detail (Lupton, 2017). Economists, for their part, have been telling stories for centuries, too. From the 18th century onward, Adam Smith’s account of self-interest in The Wealth of Nations and Jeremy Bentham’s utilitarian calculus of pleasure and pain offered a powerful narrative about how people decide (Smith, 1776; Bentham, 1789). Those ideas created the figure later called Homo Economicus — a tidy protagonist whose motives are legible, whose goals are measurable, and whose choices can be graphed.
The modern expression is Rational Choice Theory: the claim that people, equipped with stable preferences and complete information, coolly weigh costs and benefits to maximize utility (think of the textbook consumer choosing a car by cleanly trading off price, features, and reliability). This is a myth. Perhaps the theory is useful as a simplified modeling device in economics, political science, and sociology, but it also smuggles in a fiction about how real humans actually decide. Management theory inherits those assumptions, then asks designers to persuade “rational decision-makers” with rational evidence — while, of course, these decision-makers remain human, with human preferences for story and emotion. Ignore the narrative power of emotional storytelling, and you don’t get a more “rational” design practice; you get an anemic one. You get slide decks and spreadsheets that measure everything except what actually matters.
None of this is news. Psychology research has shown time and time again that we are not “rational” when it comes to choices. Neuroscientist Antonio Damasio explains why. In the amazing book The Strange Order of Things (Damasio, 2018), he traces the origins of mind and culture to the body’s ancient drive to maintain homeostasis — to feel balanced, safe, and alive. Long before reason evolved, emotion was already doing the steering. Feelings are not intrusions into rational thought; they are the primal biological platform on which thought itself is built. Emotion marks what matters, shaping our attention and memory long before logic can intervene. Rationality, in this view, is a late evolutionary luxury — a narrator that arrives after the fact, explaining decisions already made. Designers, of all people, should recognize this pattern: we design not for what people think they think, but for what they feel first, believe second, and rationalize third.
Story has been the designer’s medium since before we had software to argue about. Kendall Haven’s work brings the neuroscience into focus: our brains process incoming information in story form before it reaches consciousness; we look for characters, motives, conflict, risk, struggle, and detail, and will invent what’s missing to make sense (Haven, 2007; 2014). Effective stories minimize that distortion by supplying the elements the brain demands.
From Insight to Action: Mapping the Emotional Arc of the Journey
In practice, designers must trace the full “feeling → thinking → doing” chain in their journey maps. Interestingly, qualitative research uncovers this in reverse: observe what people do, explore how they frame it cognitively, and then dig toward the emotional spark that started it. Many stop too soon, mistaking cognition for cause. (Heuristic: if your “deep” interview is less than 60 minutes long, chances are you haven’t dug deep enough. Remember the Five Whys method.)
In journey management, this means tracing not just what customers do, but why they feel compelled to do it. When mapping experiences, reverse-engineer from the emotional triggers that drive recall and behavior. Use qualitative data not only to validate personas, but to uncover the story logic people apply to their own experiences — what they believe they’re trying to achieve, what stands in their way, and how resolution feels.
This is why every “business case for design” that begins with numbers instead of meaning misses the point. To persuade, you must speak to the organism, not just the spreadsheet. Logic confirms what story and emotion have already made believable.
The goal is often retention. We want to design for memorable experiences. As humans experience things, they are moving experiences from episodic memory into semantic memory — what Barbara Fredrickson and Daniel Kahneman showed as the dominance of remembered utility over experienced utility, and the “peak-end” structuring of recall (Fredrickson & Kahneman, 1993; Kahneman, 2011). Get the peak and the ending right in your product experiences, and the story the user tells themselves will carry your service much further than any isolated touchpoint KPI metric.
Journey management was never meant to be a spreadsheet discipline. Its true power lies in orchestrating meaningful sequences of emotion — experiences that people remember, retell, and build trust around.
When you reframe journeys as stories, you design for human cognition, not just for process. You recognize that people recall peaks and endings (Fredrickson & Kahneman), act from emotion before reason (Damasio), and understand value through narrative coherence (Haven).
So why do we keep preaching the Homo Economicus’s rational fetish? Because numbers feel safe. They give an air of “neutral objectivity”. But neutrality is not what earns belief. Belief is earned when the design narrative aligns with what the audience already values — or helps them re-value what they overlooked by making it visible, graspable, human.
Design Education and Personal Development
This is where design education must stop apologizing for itself. Our task is not to graduate tool-operators; it is to awaken distinct points of view and literacy as a deep and multi-faceted way of knowing. This is an uphill battle, unfortunately. The term “literacy” has become synonymous to “tool training”, particularly in the generative AI field.
John Ruskin put it crisply: “The highest reward for a person’s toil is not what they get for it, but what they become by it.” The same applies to any studio worth the name. Before style, intention. Before craft, attention. Established concepts like reflection-in-action and reflection-on-action (Schön, 1983) seem to slowly fade into academic obscurity, when in fact they should be front and center in professional practice. Bruno Munari called design “a method for discovering problems rather than inventing solutions” (Munari, 2009). Discovery begins when students stop asking, “What trend should I follow?” and start asking, “What truth do I need to show?”
As a returning guest lecturer at MOME, teaching under the long shadow of László Moholy-Nagy, this rings true. Moholy-Nagy (1947) insisted that “designing is not a profession but an attitude”. Attitude implies an ethic of perception (how we see), and an ethic of relation (how we care). Richard Sennett called this craftsmanship an ethical practice: a discipline of attention toward materials, people, and consequences (Sennett, 2008). None of that is reducible to software proficiency and mere tool use.
If that sounds abstract, remember Herbert Simon’s durably hard definition: design is “courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones” (Simon, 1969). That is strategy. That is systems. Tim Brown’s articulation of design thinking made this expansion mainstream — beyond artifacts to experiences and, crucially, to the organizations and policies that scaffold them (Brown, 2009). The contemporary designer must be trilingual: fluent in human narrative, technological possibilities and limitations, as well as organizational mechanics.
AI sharpens this point. Automation might seem to be able to “do our jobs”. But it will not out-interpret us. How could it? As I have already mentioned: emotion and story are key architectures for human cognition; not the statistical prediction of pre-trained transformers. The designer who can make sense — who can find the human center of a messy domain, frame a story people can believe, and then orchestrate the sequence that moves memory and behavior via emotion — that designer remains indispensable. That means that design is more than vibing together components on a Lovable screen UI that is “designed” for superficial polish.
What does this mean in practice?
First, stop outsourcing persuasion to metrics. By all means, bring metrics in at the right moments — but understand that they only support the story; they don’t substitute for it. Start every pitch, every journey, and every roadmap with characters, motives, conflicts, and risk. Name the stakes. Show the struggle. Resolve with a credible ending, then specify how we’ll know we got there.
Second, rewrite your customer journeys as stories with acts, beats, and scenes. Use dopamine to create structured curiosity (clear goals, incremental progress), oxytocin to establish trust (credibility cues, humane microcopy, reciprocal gestures), adrenaline to heighten attention when decisions matter (salient contrast, time-boundedness), and serotonin for closure (legibility, competence, memory, and a sense of fit). Design your peaks and ends intentionally aligned with the story arc. Trace actions and decisions to emotion. Close well. People remember the story their brain is evolved to carry.
Third, build portfolios as narratives of becoming. Visibility without voice is noise. Show your thesis about the world, not just your taste and UI screenshots. And don’t waste time trying to game the algorithm feed or futile SEO optimization (it’s a never-ending play over which you have no control anyway). Instead, focus on contributing distinctive value consistently.
Fourth, if you are an educator, teach collaboration as a multiplier of clarity, not an erosion of it. Victor Papanek warned that design is “the most powerful tool with which man shapes his tools and environments” (Papanek, 1971). Power therefore implies responsibility. Collaboration distributes that responsibility — across disciplines, communities, and time horizons — so that what we change, we change consciously. Anne-Marie Willis (2006) wrote about Ontological Design that “we design our world, while our world acts back on us and designs us”. Stay aware of how you and the field is changing with generative AI tools like Lovable, Figma templates, or other tools that shape how we think and what we design. The more “templated” you are, the less innovative you will become. Ironically, you might tell yourself the wrong story about your own productivity, and overestimate the gains in using generative AI tools. Stay vigilant and heed Schön’s method for reflection-on-action in order to honestly assess your own work.
Finally, remember what Massimo Vignelli fought: ugliness. Ugliness is an ethical problem more than an aesthetic one: it plays directly into apathy, superficiality, and indifference. The antidote is not novelty; it is sincerity. The market will always be crowded. But the space for sincerity is endless (Vignelli, 2010).
Stories scale belief, belief scales adoption, adoption scales impact. Designers have always been storytellers. The better we own that identity — grounded in research, disciplined by craft, anchored in ethics — the more serious our influence becomes.
Traditional metrics do not convert the uninterested. Understand people, trust your understanding of what they value and why, and design the story arc that lets them feel the difference. In the end, journey management is about composition — not control. We choreograph how people experience purpose, trust, and satisfaction over time. The best journeys, like the best stories, are the ones that make people feel something worth remembering.
Samwise Gamgi says it best:
“It’s like in the great stories, Mr. Frodo. The ones that really mattered. […] Those were the stories that stayed with you. That meant something, even if you were too small to understand why. But I think, Mr. Frodo, I do understand. I know now. Folk in those stories had lots of chances of turning back, only they didn’t. They kept going. Because they were holding on to something.”
References
- Bentham, J. (1789). An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation. Oxford University Press (current edition 1996).
- Brown, T. (2009). Change by Design: How Design Thinking Transforms Organizations and Inspires Innovation. HarperBusiness.
- Damasio, A. (2018). The Strange Order of Things: Life, Feeling, and the Making of Cultures. Pantheon Books.
- Fredrickson, B. L., & Kahneman, D. (1993). When More Pain Is Preferred to Less: Adding a Better End. Psychological Science, 4(6), 401–405.
- Haven, K. (2007). Story Proof: The Science Behind the Startling Power of Story. Libraries Unlimited.
- Haven, K. (2014). Story Smart: Using the Science of Story to Persuade, Influence, Inspire, and Teach. Libraries Unlimited.
- Kahneman, D. (2011). Thinking, Fast and Slow. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
- Lupton, E. (2017). Design Is Storytelling. Cooper-Hewitt Museum.
- Moholy-Nagy, L. (1947). Vision in Motion. Paul Theobald & Co.
- Munari, B. (2009). Design as Art. Penguin Books. (Original work published 1966.)
- Papanek, V. (1971). Design for the Real World: Human Ecology and Social Change. Pantheon Books.
- Schön, D. A. (1983). The Reflective Practitioner: How Professionals Think in Action. Basic Books.
- Sennett, R. (2008). The Craftsman. Yale University Press.
- Simon, H. A. (1969). The Sciences of the Artificial. MIT Press.
- Smith, A. (1776). An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. W. Strahan and T. Cadell.
- Vignelli, M. (2010). The Vignelli Canon. Lars Müller Publishers.
- Willis, A.-M. (2006). Ontological Designing. Design Philosophy Papers, 4(2), 69–92.
