Leveling up your UX Maturity
By: Lodovico Marchesini
Tags: Design, Maturity, Digital Design, Designops, UX

Leveling up your UX Maturity

and how a design agency can play a pivotal role in doing so.

A ways back I had the opportunity to give a talk at a meetup whose theme revolved around building and growing your team’s UX competencies. My co-presenters were there representing the companies of ASML and Brightcape. I was there on behalf of digital design agency Hike One to discuss how companies can go about leveling up their UX Maturity as a catalyst for change and what role a design agency can play in this. Below you will find the summary of my talk, but for those not in the mood to read I have uploaded the meetup in its entirety so that you can listen to my silky silver-tongued voice as a white noise backdrop while you toil away at home during these remote times ;)

TLDR:

Maturing your UX processes takes both time & effort (duh!) Identifying which level you are on is the first step towards leveling up. Watch the talk I gave below if reading just isn’t your style;

My presentation is from minute 29–44

For those that dare to read;

What is UX Maturity, and why a pyramid?

UX maturity is defined as being the level of integrated user-focused processes within a company’s business, technological, and design decisions. As a UX/UI designer, I define a company’s UX Maturity as its gradual growth towards having a user focus at the forefront of strategic decisions. This gradual growth in itself has distinct milestones that the company undergoes. While there are many models out there for mapping these milestones, for my presentation and this article I used the model laid out by Charlie Kreitzberg as inspiration. In Charlie’s model, he states that a company experiences the maturing of its UX processes through six distinct levels that build upon one another. We can see these six levels as a pyramid, where the bottom is level one and the top is level six.

The heaviest blocks are on the bottom of the pyramid

The bottom level of this pyramid consists of the biggest and heaviest blocks to set in place. These blocks in themselves serve as the foundation for which the rest of the pyramid is built upon. This takes enormous amounts of effort to set into place.

The top levels cannot be built until the bottom ones have

The top levels of the pyramid cannot be built until the bottom levels have. This takes time to occur as no top can be built without a stable foundation. If these levels represent a company’s gradual growth to being a mature UX company then it is concluded that UX maturity takes time and effort. Time being something that we commit to and effort as something we act upon.

It takes time and effort.

So what are these levels to maturing your company’s UX process?

01 — The total lack of UX awareness.

The total lack of or awareness that UX even exists. Which doubles to say that the user needs are either not in scope or simply unknown. You will hear statements like; who is the UX designer and we don’t need or have time for design.

02 — The on-demand user experience.

The on-demand experience. It can feel as if the UX/user focus is treated as simply a phase in a project rather than a sustained endeavor. You will hear; we need designs for these screens, we don’t have time for exploration we need validation, and my favorite we need some UX here.

03 — The isolated UX project.

The door here is cracked but key stakeholders and departments are still hesitant to get fully involved in UX processes or see the potential of its impact. Our designers say that our users are saying this about our product. Close but the stakeholders are still not hearing the user’s needs for themselves and only from secondary resources

04 — The growing business of UX

At this level we see the user focus to start to play an important role in how decisions within teams are being made. This is the Tipping point! You will hear Stakeholders begin to say more and more that we need to talk to and understand users meaning that you are changing from viewing your users as a step in the process to instead being a valuable source of insight and data.

05 — UX as a strategic weapon.

Here the user focus happens earlier and earlier on in the process and we see cycles of iterative design and research processes take place. Having a user focus now becomes a weapon in creating impact in that the team is understanding user insights and utilizing them to create future plans and decisions. You will a change from “ we need to talk to our users to more of we need to understand our user first before we build anything.

06 — The integrated UX.

Here a user focus is integrated throughout your company and is an integral part of strategic planning and decisions. Here you will hear all that all disciplines are working collaboratively together to integrate their needs with the users in developing the roadmap strategy for the company’s product.

The levels of UX maturity

So, how do I level up!?

So how do you level up from where you are to the next level on the pyramid? Below are examples and activities that can assist a company in their processes in leveling up their UX maturity.

Level 01 → Level 02: Patience

Patience is key, if you are at level one it's going to be quite the journey. The first thing you should do is hire a design team to move forward with. At the bare minimum, this is two people, a manager, and a designer. Secondly being an advocate for a user-driven focus at every moment is another.

Level 02 → Level 03: Document everything

You need people to start believing that having a user focus can be a strategic weapon. It all starts with building a body of work and then sharing this with everyone, transparency and accessibility are key.

Level 03 → Level 04: Measure improvements

Nice that everything is documented but you also need to show how all the user focus endeavors are actually improving the product and the experience. How you can do this is by standardizing your processes to build uniformity in what you communicate to stakeholders and team members.

Level 04 → Level 05: Working together more closely

Moving to this level revolves around going beyond just sharing your insights and data with your team members and stakeholders it's about getting them to take ownership as well.

Level 05 → Level 06: Tweaking and innovating the processes

If you are here then you are well on your way, and here it becomes about replicating and evangelizing your UX processes across all teams and departments within your company.

Getting to the next level

How a Design Agency helps level your UX maturity

So, how does a (digital) design agency help you level up and mature your UX processes? You should see a digital design agency as a sort of vitamin pill. Not there to fully replace your processes but rather instead to enhance them and make them much more sustainable and effective. This pill I have observed during my time at Hike One can be taken in one of three ways;

Inserting a role in your team.

Undergoing a UX project with a team provided by a design agency.

Educating your team not the latest UX practices, tooling, and methodologies

A. Inserting a Role

Inserting a role into your team is exactly what it sounds like. A design agency, such as Hike One, supplements your team with a role that is currently needed or missing within your team. This can be anything from a UX/UI designer to a Scrum Master or Design Lead. This insertion of a role fills the needs you currently have and helps you fill out your team so that there is no delay in your company’s UX endeavors. Ultimately you take in a role to become a part of your team.

B. Project UX

Project UX, unlike inserting a role, revolves around the digital design agency taking in your team as a part of theirs and ultimately getting you to where you want to be. A common example of this is a design sprint as a Project UX. Here the design agency takes your team along in the process making sure all the activities and roles are fulfilled, resulting in the delivery of a tested prototype with end-users. Utilizing a digital design agency for Project UX aids you in overcoming the hurdles of not having the capacity nor knowledge necessary to bring your UX endeavors to full fruition. A Project UX is a manner in which you can showcase how UX ideally can become involved in business and strategic planning and decision making.

C. UX Education

The most sustainable of the three ways a design agency can act as a catalyst for leveling up your UX processes is to milk them for the knowledge they possess. By having a design agency educate your team on their processes and own ways of working you are literally leveling up the knowledge of your own team. Whether this is on how to run a design sprint or conduct a structured usability test, a design agency serves as being an incubator for the latest UX tooling, processes, and methodologies. Why not utilize them to level up the competencies of your team and fill any knowledge gaps that are present.

To summarize, design agencies help you level up and mature your UX processes by;

- Being the spark plug to support the competency gaps within your own team - To get you to where you want to be and showcase how the process can be repeated. - Giving you the tools and know how to level your UX maturity yourself.

Wrapping up

If you would like to hear more on my thoughts on this topic of leveling up your UX processes, please feel free to reach out to me. If you want to get more detail of what I discussed, watch the video at the beginning of this article to see not only my talk but as well as the other two.

For those wanting to know where I got this knowledge, everything I learned either came from my observation in my day to day as a UX Designer at Hike One or was inspired by the following article by Sandro Meyer