A story about growing UX maturity
As UX as a discipline approaches Gartner’s plateau of productivity, more and more firms are trying to incorporate UX. Although the majority of the companies recognize the value of UX, they often struggle to take steps in the right direction. During my career as a consultant, I’ve met and assisted several companies who were at different stages in this transformational journey, ranging from aviation over public services, logistics to retail. The one thing what remained consistent: growing maturity took time.
But first, let’s go through the different phases together.
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Phase 0: Opinion centered design
In worst case, there is little actual interest in the user. In these companies, UX is perceived as just another buzzword! Typically, there is no involvement of the user at all. Users are not considered interesting enough according to some influential stakeholders. When users don’t understand the product or fail to complete the task at hand, they “should read the manual” or are considered as “dumb users”.
In most cases, the focus of the project or product team is on delivering as many features as possible. More functionalities equal a better product in their philosophy, not aware of the problems this causes such as featuritis.
The companies in these phase perform opinion centered design. A team in such a company consist of a few analysts & developers working in a waterfall way. The analyst, developer or business representative with the most outspoken opinion decides on product behavior, look & feel and navigation patterns, leading to a product which is hard to use, difficult to learn and not useful at all. In short, opinion centered design at its worst…
“Experiences conceived by business, built by developers”
Opinion centered design fails to deliver true value. As the value lenses approach states, value is created where desirability from a users’, viability from a business’ and feasibility from technological perspective meet. But without user proximity, desirability is hard to attain. In other words, without user contact, it’s hard to solve the right problem in the right way (cfr. double diamond).

Phase 1: UX = Prettier UI
After evangelization, the first steps towards more UX maturity can be taken. By sharing some success stories from competitors, being inspirational about UX & creating relationships with key stakeholders, the awareness about the relevance of UX grows.
Luckily for me, this was the stage where I jumped in at my current project. Even though the majority of project stakeholders was convinced of UX, there was still a journey to complete. For most of them UX meant: “creating prettier screens” and a designer “layers beauty into an application”. So UX is only involved in a late stage of the feature lifecycle. Nevertheless, the first step towards real UX was set: from “opinion centered design” towards “opinion centered design made beautiful”.
“Experiences conceived by business, designed by designers and built by developers”
Being UI focused results in a product that doesn’t meet the usability standards. But being UI focused, leads to a beautiful product, some kind of visual heroine to the eye.

Multiple business representatives were (and still are) charmed by the beauty of the product and wanted to reuse the same look and feel for all in-house products. So we standardized our visual heroine by setting up a design and pattern library. From then on, the beauty could easily be spread over the complete organization. The praise of these business representatives gave us some organizational credibility and freedom to be able to take the next steps towards user proximity.
Although UI design isn’t my specialty and neither driving me forward, I took one for the team, knowing that it was a necessary step in our journey. In other words, my main concern was creating good looking screens to create business impact. In the meantime, I hoped that the navigation flows and behavior, which were still relying on the team’s intuition & assumptions, were usable and understandable for our user base.
At that time, UX equaled UI. Creating visual heroine to generate business impact was the primary goal, hoping for some freedom to take the next steps.
Phase 2: UX as a role
In most cases, the first user centered design techniques are conducted late in the development process, first in the prototyping and next in the user validation phase. In our next step towards UX maturity, we had to start with user validation to improve our product. After convincing the product stakeholders, we ran a small usability test, where we gave several end-users one of their top tasks to complete, asked them to think out loud and observed silently as they tried to finish these tasks. The only response we would give to questions such as ‘should I click here?’ were more questions: ‘what do you expect to happen?’. Afterwards, it dawned on us that we didn’t knew the user … So we shared the numerous insights to improve the product and slowly but surely the awareness rose that user proximity was far off. Indeed, we can confirm that “we are not our users”, as NNG states!
Knowing that the effort spent into product discovery and validation sessions is an investment well made. I started to pivot my responsibilities from UI design towards discovery, UI & UX design and validation. In concreto, we organised observation sessions & discovery workshops (i.e. card sorting sessions, mental model mapping,…). Product discovery focuses on the user instead of on his chief, a product or process owner as waterfall methodologies propose. From then on, real user proximity became within reach. As a consequence, stakeholder maps, persona’s, user journeys, top tasks, empathy maps,… appeared to synthesize the insights. Furthermore, we set up usability labs regularly to validate prototypes and products. Enter the first UX process enabling us to solve the right problem in the right way!

Despite, the team consisted of four roles: analysts, UX & UI designer and developers, the user belonged to the UX designer. I was the only one who had access to the user. User proximity as a role in the process.
“Experiences conceived by user needs, validated by user research, designed with users and tested by users”
Phase 3: UX as a mindset
As a consequence, developers & analysts directed their user related questions to me and I became an intermediary between the product team and the user. I became a bottleneck, the ‘user expert’. After watching the inspirational talk of Luke Wroblewski at Google Conversations about closing the gap between maker & user, I decided to shape my job and take the next step for the team to become user centric. As UX is about empathy & proximity with your users, everyone in our team should live these skills and meet, observe,… our users as frequently as possible.
“UX is not about hiring UI & UX designers, it’s about installing a culture”
Although the team structure didn’t change, we still had all four roles represented in the team, our mindset changed drastically. As a UX designer, I became more of a coach in user centricity (i.e. how to ask the right questions, what are the relevant design principles, facilitator of design studios,…) making sure that everyone got access to our users in one or more steps of the process.
Besides the mindset, the UX process was further expanded. User centered design techniques became a consistent part of each phase of a feature lifecycle. Research was expanded to qualitative & quantitative research respectively in the form of lightweight usability labs and a bi-weekly “our product in figures” session. Combining these two approaches gave (and still give) us crucial insights in people’s behavior & why they behave(d) in a certain way. Furthermore, design studios & critiques — were we openly discuss all aspects of the value lenses — were introduced and became a critical part of the success. At this moment, every stakeholder is speaking with our users, the analysts are leading during discovery & conceptual design. Thereafter, our UI designer takes over in the prototyping phase. Finally the whole team is involved in the user validation phase. My role? Making this process work!

In addition, I created an experience vision, some sort of flag in the sand. The team can clearly see the flag, yet it’s far enough away that we won’t reach it any time soon. Expliciting a clear vision helps to indicate direction, detailing that vision into principles streamlines the decision process. In that way, every member of the product team is able to make choices which move the product in the right direction.
Currently, we are in the middle of the transformation, somewhere between phase two & three. But it seems that it leads to more knowledge about our users and thus better design decisions. Step by step, user data — both qualitative and quantitative — is identifying what to focus on and in that way guiding the product evolution. And so a transformation occurred from “making pretty screens” to a user centric mindset for all team members. In the same way, my role evolved from creating beautiful designs to coaching teams to remain user centric, assisting analysts with questions about user research, facilitating user validation sessions or discovery workshops, organizing design studio’s,… Put differently, UX moved upstream and got involved earlier in the product or feature lifecycle. This approach reduced the risks related to product creation and led to a product which fitted the users’ needs in a better way.

Next, we will strive for ultimate user & customer centricity. This is only attained as all team members, not only are convinced of the importance of user centricity, but carry out this message and live the principles. In concreto, everyone within our team should be able to lead in each phase of the process. No matter what is their specialty! Further, our team still has to grow into the business side to be able to demonstrate how our design choices drive business value. So still some steps to take before my job is done.
My learnings in a nutshell:
- In the beginning, we tried to skip steps, mainly because I didn’t like to focus on UI design only, but that backfired. It’s a matter of taking babysteps and not skipping one…
- As there is a lot of change involved, this journey takes time. So, be patient and take your time to walk the process!
- It’s important to stay agile and keep failing fast along the way! During the journey, we kept iterating to find the process, which suited us. And I’m sure, we will keep on doing this!
To conclude, I would like to thank the team because all this wasn’t possible without them. They are an amazing, open minded and inspiring product team, a joy to work with! Thanks guys!
This is my perspective, but how did you approach growing in UX maturity? I’d love to hear about your approach, questions, remarks,... Please get in touch via LinkedIn.

