Improving UX Maturity

Understanding Where User Experience Fits at Your Company

Having a basic understanding of each role is critical to project success and provides insight into the value proposition, what motivates consumers, and what’s technically possible. The best teams rely on this three-legged stool approach to ensure they’re building the right thing before they actually start developing it.

CEOs that are dubious of the value user experience provides need only look at leading organizations such as Apple, Coca-Cola, and Ford who hold significant market advantage over their competitors due in part to leading with design.

While over 5 years old, you can see the steady increase in growth from the early 2010s through to beyond 2015.

Before a company can say they are a forward-thinking, design-driven organization, they first need to understand the pivotal role the UX team plays in their success.

This is how Agile teams must operate — working in concert to reach a common goal and relying on one another. But it’s not always easy to tell how the organization views designers or how they fit into the bigger picture.

Not sure what value your company puts on user experience design? Try answering these questions:

These issues and others like them can occur when UX isn’t aligned with the vision of where a company is headed. They are symptoms of a company that’s still operating as if it were 2008. Here are some tips on how you can bring this vision of UX maturity closer to reality:

Years ago, when I was first brought on our Analytics team to lead our UX effort, I found that many of my colleagues didn’t understand the UX role and how it related to them. It wasn’t until I shared the grid below and explained that rather than using UX as a service for one-off projects, I could do much more did they begin to understand. We went from designing better-looking Excel spreadsheets (yes, that was something they actually thought I did), to becoming a valued partner in collecting qualitative data, running Sprint workshops, and organizing interdepartmental feedback sessions. We were able to go from individual requests with low impact to interdisciplinary projects with much more impact. When visibility in the form of qualified leads and page utilization increased, people started paying attention because it meant we were making a difference to the bottom line.

While we still had a long way to go, it was a start. And that’s the way it goes with maturing UX at your company. You must find the projects you believe put you and your department in a position of strength and not be beholden to one-off jobs that provide little value. Stop doing those low-impact jobs and start saying yes to projects that matter and you’ll soon find the impact of your efforts will be felt company-wide. It did for us, and I think it will for you as well. How are you driving success at your company through maturing the UX role? I’d love to hear your thoughts.

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