Leveling Up Your UX Maturity

UX Maturity is having the characteristics of being fully developed or having reached an advanced stage in a process. With any company, there are many levels of maturity at which you can operate. These levels can be identified in how we run meetings, how we work cross-functionally or even how we build and release products.

There is a common misconception that the larger the company, the more mature its processes are. That is not necessarily true. It more often than not comes down to how well the organization embraces and incorporates the research and design process into its own. It’s also about understanding if the process in which it is leveraging is being effectively used. Let’s take a look at each level.

So, what are the levels?

Level 1 — No Clue:

I’ve come to find this less typical in recent years, but it is characterized by the idea that the only goal is to build great features. At this stage, the engineering department or company as a whole only focus on producing. You are forced to use a system, regardless if it is solving a problem or is intuitive to the user. If you feel like your company is in this stage of maturity, run! It’s pointless to think you can promote change within the organization. The organization has to want that change.

Level 2 — Design-Centered:

At a certain point, a company will realize the impact great design can have on their business. The problem is, they are not quite user-centered in their approach. Understanding the divergence between design and art is important. Design is developing an understanding of what brings value to a user or community and providing a solution for it. Art is more subjective and interpretational. The design should be understood.

At this level, designers still rely on their intuition without the outside influence of actual users. Fortunately, you still have a leg up at this stage: the company does care about usability. They just don’t ultimately understand how to fund or execute it yet.

Level 3 — Operating Lean:

Now we are making some progress. In stage 3 we have moved past the idea that we just need good design and we have realized that part of that good design is understanding the end user's needs. Although this is understood more widely throughout the company and with designers specifically, the effort to pull in this external data and research is still less than ideal.

Much of the support will come from provisional efforts championed by a few employees or groups within the company. An example could be pulling in a small group of recruits to test against. Even if you are not testing against the ideal 5 users (based on the Poisson Distribution), you can still increase the success rate significantly. The company starts to see the benefit of great research and usability studies, but they don’t understand the effort that goes into it. You still rely on a bit of adulation sprinkled in with logic.

Level 4 — Dedicated to The Cause:

UX is a thing at this point and you have a dedicated budget and maybe even a dedicated team! Let’s not get too excited though, there is still lots of room to grow. Advancing to stage 4 is usually a byproduct of smaller impromptu UX projects that have caught the attention of someone higher up in the company or someone that was involved in one of those project getting promoted to a position of influence. Enough influence to pull a consistent budget and a set of resources to support UX as a thing within the company.

The UX resources are usually scattered throughout, with no real systematic process in place. It is still a fairly new concept to most coworkers and the company overall. They can’t quite wrap their heads around the difference between UI design and UX work. At this point, you are just “making things pretty”. To jump to the next level you need to certify and show return on the work you do. This is done by conducting studies and developing bodies of work that have a high return to the business. Higher conversion rates, fewer calls to the support center and overall better productivity for your users can all have a major impact.

Level 5 — This is a Thing:

Now you have a dedicated budget, an official team and a UX Manager with the concession to own UX and usability throughout the company. Your team is usually small, but efficient. The majority of your efforts are mostly within the usability and testing space, but you are starting to refine and prime your engine of practice. At this point, you might start archiving findings to develop a better understanding of your company’s users.

The UX Manager holds an important role at this stage. It’s less about pushing pixels on a screen and more about building a holistic approach to experience and design throughout the organization. The focus should be on building up the company’s UX maturity and establishing a foundation of best practice and process standardization for the work being produced. It’s important to start evangelizing UX at this point, but the resources and time are just not there yet. Once there are, you will be well on your way to level 6.

Level 6 — Trust the Process:

By this level, you have conquered the idea that UX is just making things “pretty”, right before they are built. UX is now integrated into the product development process. Research is being conducted before a single pixel is pushed, design milestones are tracked and the design team has started to leverage and build upon a pattern library.

Although there is still a limited budget for the design team, there is now a process in place for making sure projects are hitting the right success criteria for user experience. Design is no longer considered to be a single screen delivered but is it now known to be the process in which you get to that output.

To push beyond this stage you need to evangelize the importance of UX throughout other departments. It needs to be everyone’s responsibility to make sure standards for great UX are being met. Not just the UX department.

Level 7 — Stay Empathetic

At this level, the research cadence is consistence and frequent. User research is leveraged at the start of every project. It defines the problem and helps build requirements.

Usability has gone beyond just making things easier to use and has reached a level at which you tracking it with quantitative data. This data is leveraged to make larger decisions on what should be built next. The engine of Product, Engineering, and Design is accelerating and the influence of users is its fuel.

Level 8 — You’ve Reached the Final Level

Few companies reach this level without being built on a foundation of design. It’s just not something you typically see. Even in new startups. The major difference between levels 7 and 8 is that user research is now influencing and more often than not dictates the overall business vision and strategy.

It’s not just about building great products anymore. It’s about leveraging design as much more than finished screens. It’s about understanding your users better and taking that insight to drive real business results. This is the point in which your company looks beyond the quantitative data or single question responses and digs in deeper to how their users behave and interact with their product and brand to forecast and drive more impactful business results.

In Conclusion

Many of these levels were identified from both my past experiences, as well as other studies. The point is not to only identify what level you are at but also understand how you can work towards and get to that next level. Every company is different. Don’t get frustrated in the situation you are in. Look for opportunities and partnerships to build up your company’s UX maturity. Its impact is invaluable and every department will benefit.