Assessing the UX maturity stage of your organization
Becoming an agent of change recently has become a new challenge for UX Professionals in a different set of organizations. After actively sharing about this topic in several speaking events, I was surprised by how many people approached me afterwards, feeling resonated with the challenges I’ve experienced and shared. As I mentioned in another article before regarding the challenges, there are at least other different cases I’ve learned especially after meeting these UX professionals facing the daily battle at work, but here are the most common ones:
- The only UX person at the company dealing with low awareness of UX
Example: UX designer also designs flyers, banners or logos - People with a different mindset and expectation of UX as a role
A common misunderstanding of UX role: UX designers make things look pretty/nice - The “no budget for UX”-Management
Example: “We don’t have time and money to invest in user research”
Assessing UX Maturity Stage
Based on the challenges mentioned above, this UX maturity stage below could help you and your team to assess your organization’s status quo towards UX and enable you to take steps to drive the change and make an impact.
You can also check other UX Maturity stages available out there from Invision and Chris Avore. Some of the contents below were inspired by Nordstorm Rack webinar (stage 1 and 4), also tailored based on real experiences at FlixBus, especially for the 2nd, 3rd stage.
These are the characteristics and strategies from the 5 different stages:
Stage 1: Inception — Absence of UX
• Characteristics of “Inception” stage
- There’s no UX design or UX research
- Rejections of having UX influence in the product lifecycle
•Strategy to achieve “Awareness” stage
- Introduce UX deliverables and tools
- Introduce the voice of customers
Stage 2: Awareness — UX as aesthetics (FlixBus case starts here)
- Characteristics of “Awareness” stage
- Low awareness in understanding the value of UX
- Lacking UX resources
- Research: evaluative
- UX is seen as aesthetic
- No time to invest in UX activities - Strategy to achieve ”Adopting” stage
The team of UX designers, developers, product manager, agile coach, and engineering manager at FlixBus tried to push this initiative forward by introducing these strategies:
- Conduct usability tests as a common practice in the product lifecycle
- Introduce evaluative research
- Share findings from usability test to show the value of UX
- Introduce design sprint
- Invite UX expertise from other company to share about the value of UX
- Scale UX resources
- Adopt remote testing tool to test as early and often
The most important recipe is that having the strong bottom-up allies to push this initiative to the top, followed by the top management that is open to new initiatives and experiments.
Stage 3: Adopting - UX as a process
At this stage, UX research team at FlixBus was formed. We have grown the resource from 1 to 2, then finally we’re 4 now (and still growing). With more resources, we managed to support the other teams with research more effectively. We are a team of 4 people coming from Marketing, Product Management, Human Computer Interaction, and Design background; embracing diversity to complement different areas of expertise.
- Characteristics for “Adopting” stage
- People get the value of investing in UX process and start to integrate it as a common practice in the product lifecycle
- UX research supports designers and product teams to influence their decisions
- Research evolves to becoming generative - Strategy to achieve “Maturing” stage
Together with other teams at FlixBus (marketing, strategic project, branding, business, designers, product, customer service and many more), UX research team is thriving together to establish the 4th stage. Many initiatives and strategies the team did and planned together to reach the “maturing” stage:
- Share the UX findings more transparently across the organization through slack and confluence page, use template that is informative which contains highlights
- Collect proven study cases and present them to the product teams or even bigger audience
- Quantification for impacts: work closely with product analyst to combine the quant with qual insights
- Enable others to do research through training and providing guidelines
- Introduce the user-centric design framework to business by conducting workshops to define product strategy
- Conducting field studies to support business and product in discovering new insights from different markets
- Provide UX findings sharing platform to democratize UX and enable others to search for past findings and to act upon them as a source of inspiration for the product strategy
Stage 4: Maturing — UX informs product strategy
- Characteristics of “Maturing” stage:
- Demand in scaling UX resources
- UX drives product strategy - Strategies to achieve “Integrated” stage:
At FlixBus, we are still progressing to reach the 4th stage and we don’t know yet when to reach this stage. Any of you are at this stage already? Would be happy to hear your approach to reach this stage!
Stage 5: Integrated - UX part of global strategy
Characteristics:
- UX is part of global corporate Strategy
- User-centered culture
- Executive Leadership advocate
Thrive with UX together with people
We have learned that building a great product and service that people would love revolves around people. Not only people we’re building the product for, but also people who build them together.
So, have you assessed your organization’s UX maturity stage? Which one is yours? Would be great to share with us your challenges and your strategies!