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TOWARDS CORPORATE UX
MATURITY
24/02/2011
CHRISTOPHER KHALIL
DIRECTOR OF USER EXPERIENCE
NEWS DIGITAL MEDIA

INTRO…
 A framework for determining your organisational maturity
Neilsen 2006
http://www.useit.com/alertbox/maturity.html
 Goal is to become a User Driven Organisation
– User data helps determines projects that are funded
– User research helps determines company direction
– Experience design extended beyond IxD into Customer
Experience

STAGES OF MATURITY
 Stage 1: Hostility toward UX. This stage can last decades.
 Stage 2: Developer-centred UX. Two to three years.
 Stage 3: Skunkworks UX. Two to three years.
 Stage 4: Dedicated UX budget. Two to three years.
 Stage 5: Managed UX. Six to seven years.
 Stage 6: A Systematic UX process. Six to seven years.
 Stage 7: Integrated user-centred design. Insufficient data.
 Stage 8: User-driven corporation.

STAGE 1: HOSTILITY TOWARD UX
 In this mindset, humans are irrelevant—they're told to
use the system, regardless of whether doing so is easy or
pleasant.
 Throwback to early days of computing where hardware
costs etc meant it made sense to subjugate people to
computers needs.
 Hard to change behaviour.
 Timescale: This stage can last decades.

STAGE 2: DEVELOPER-CENTRED UX
 Team relies on its own intuition about what constitutes
good UX
 Works ok if mental model matches audience – i.e.
developing tools such as IDE’s etc
 For every other case this is a bad idea
 We know too much about the problem space
 BUT executives generally responsive to the idea of UX
 Logic, flattery, persuasion, analytics
 Timescale: Two to three years.

STAGE 3: SKUNKWORKS UX.
 No official recognition of UX, nor is there an approved
budget
 Organization realises need to be customer focused
 Guerrilla testing prevalent
 Activities are ad hoc and driven by UX advocates
 Primitive but effective skunkwork techniques employed
 Rely on results to progress: analytics, AB test, survey
 To prevent being overlooked, save the initial design ideas,
clumsy as they may seem, and show before/after
comparisons to document the UX advances.

STAGE 4: DEDICATED UX BUDGET
 Someone higher up makes the UX aspects of product quality a
higher priority.
 A dedicated budget for UX allows UX activities to be planned
 There are dedicated UX staff
 Main UX method is User Testing (but usually happens late in
process)
 A budget to recruit participants
 The team spends most of its time fixing individual design mistakes,
and no time at increasing organisational maturity.
 To move to next stage: Collect ammunition, higher conversion
rates, fewer calls to call centre, increasedproductivty - involve
senior stakeholders in sessions

STAGE 5: MANAGED UX.
 Official UX group, led by Manager
 Studies are conducted more consistently as the UX group refines its
methodology
 The group archives and compiles the findings of UX reports.
 The company has a person whose job it is to think about UX across
the organization, in order to increase organisational maturity and
leverage existing UX staff for more strategic purposes
 To move to next stage: Use budget on high profile projects aim for
spectacular wins, evangelise, participatory design, involve senior
stakeholders in sessions
 Timescale: Six to seven years

STAGE 6: A SYSTEMATIC UX PROCESS.
 The company has recognized the need for an actual user-centred design process, with
multiple activities and milestones
 Iterative design is more common because the company realizes that the best UI quality
requires several rounds of UX
 Projects are prioritized according to the business value of their user experience.
 Even projects that don't get a lot of UX resources go through at least some form of UX
review before they're approved for release
 The UX budget large enough that key projects receive sufficient resources
 The company starts doing field studies
 To move to the next stage
 Use participatory & iterative design to bring stakeholders on the journey.
 Lobby for Field Studies
 Timescale: Six to seven years

STAGE 7: INTEGRATED USER-CENTRED DESIGN.
 Field studies, as a form of very early user research is in the DNA.
 Each step in the development process is infused with user data,
including the project definition and the requirements phase.
 Beyond simply estimating user experience quality, the company
tracks quality through quantitative UX metrics.
 Each project has defined UX goals that these measurements must
surpass for the design to be greenlighted for release.
 The company begins to employ UX data to determine what it
should build.

STAGE 8: USER-DRIVEN CORPORATION.
 User data now determines the type of projects that are funded.
 User research determines the company’s overall direction and
priorities. The concept of total user experience is extended beyond
the screen to other customer-company interaction.
 The company uses the same UX methods, but these now affect
corporate strategy & activities beyond interaction design.
 Corporate decision-making takes a mixed methody approach
including data from behavioural observation of real users—data
about what customers do.

CONCLUSION
 The timing obviously differs among organizations
 Start-ups are lucky and can begin the maturity process at
stage 3 or stage 4
 Steps must be addressed in order, hard to skip a stage
 Too many simultaneous changes are likely to result in
failure
 Find the best ‘buttons’ in your organisation to press and
keep punching them.

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