Meryem Ghatrif
Meryem Ghatrif

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Pensées · UX strategy

How mature is UX in your organisation?

What UX maturity really measures, the models worth knowing, a ten-question check to run with your team in under an hour, and small steps to grow one stage at a time.

8 min read

One afternoon in 2009, three founders sat with Paul Graham of Y Combinator, scrolling through forty New York listings on their own website. Revenue was stuck at $200 a week. Joe Gebbia saw what the listings had in common: poor photos, taken on phones or borrowed from classified sites. Guests could not see what they were paying for.

Graham’s advice was not technical: go to New York, rent a camera, spend time with the hosts, replace the photos. The founders of Airbnb took the next flight. A week later, as Gebbia tells it, weekly revenue had doubled to $400.

For their first year, he admits, the team had sat behind their screens “trying to code our way through problems”. Graham later wrote that about thirty days of meeting users in person “made the difference between success and failure”.

None of this needed a UX department. It needed someone to look closely at what people saw, and then to go back. How often an organisation does that, and how much what it sees changes its decisions: that is UX maturity.

What maturity really measures

UX maturity is not a verdict on how pretty your website is. Nielsen Norman Group says it measures “an organization’s desire and ability to successfully deliver user-centered design”; the Interaction Design Foundation (IxDF) speaks of “how well a company understands, integrates, and values UX design and research”. In plain words: how your organisation decides, and whether real people have a say.

The stakes are real. In a 2018 report, McKinsey tracked 300 listed companies over five years: the top quarter on its design index saw revenue growth 32 percentage points above that of their industry peers. That is a correlation, not a promise. More telling is the gap: over 40 percent of the companies surveyed were not talking to their end users during development, and just over half had no objective way to assess what their design teams produced.

Smaller organisations pay for that gap more quietly. Picture two agencies in Casablanca, each redesigning a client’s website. One opens a mood board; the other calls five of the client’s customers to ask what they came to do. Both deliver on time, but only one will know whether the new site works.

Four maps, one direction

Nielsen Norman Group describes six stages (Absent, Limited, Emergent, Structured, Integrated, User-driven) across strategy, culture, process and outcomes. At the Emergent stage, when trade-offs bite, UX is “still the first to go”. The authors see Integrated, not the very top, as the right aim for most organisations, and their free quiz takes most people under ten minutes.

Jared Spool names five stages for product and service teams, from the Dark Ages to Infused UX Design. Maturity, he argues, belongs to teams, not companies: one firm can have a team in the Dark Ages and another with its own designers. At the last stage, non-designers make good design decisions too, because “UX design is a learned skill, and developers and product managers can learn it”.

The Design Management Institute takes a process view in its Design Maturity Matrix: five levels, from Initial (ad hoc efforts) through Repeatable, Defined and Managed to Optimized. DMI says it suits organisations of any size.

The IxDF combines these ideas in seven phases, from Unrecognized to Visionary, with an honest note: organisations move at different speeds, and some plateau. For a small organisation, four stages are enough, named the way a gardener would: seed, shoot, bud, flower.

A government that put users in the window

In 2011, the UK government created the Government Digital Service (GDS), whose first big project was GOV.UK, a single website for government. The team wrote user needs on index cards, hundreds of them, until only the office floor was large enough to sort them.

In March 2012, someone put up persona posters. Ben Terrett, the head of design, objected that “the whole country were our users, not some neat persona”, tore a hole in a sheet of paper, wrote “Users” above it and stuck it in a window overlooking a busy pedestrian crossing.

Weeks later, GDS published its design principles as a single web page because, Terrett wrote, “guidelines are more likely to be followed if they are simple, clear, helpful and easy to share”. GOV.UK went live in October 2012 and won the Design Museum’s Design of the Year in 2013.

Today the principles open with “Start with user needs”, and the government’s Service Standard with “Understand users and their needs”. Read it as a growth chart: a torn sheet of paper, then principles anyone can share, then a standard meant to outlast any one person.

IBM tells a similar story at scale. When Phil Gilbert began recruiting designers in 2013, IBM had one designer for every 72 coders; by 2017, it had one for every eight. Yet in 2015 Gilbert put the emphasis elsewhere: “The real interesting part of our program, though, is about the other 350,000 IBMers.” A small business needs no design army, only people who answer the phone, write the emails and build the pages making good small decisions.

Measure yours in under an hour

Gather three to five people who see the business from different sides: whoever decides, whoever builds, whoever answers customers. Each person answers alone for ten minutes, scoring every question 0 (no, or rarely), 1 (sometimes) or 2 (yes, as a habit). Then compare for half an hour, and keep fifteen minutes to choose one step.

  1. In the last month, has a decision-maker watched a real customer use your website, product or service?
  2. When you disagree about a change, does evidence about users weigh more than the most senior opinion?
  3. Do you test drafts (a sketch, a prototype, a new text) with real people before building them?
  4. Is one named person responsible for the experience, with time set aside for it?
  5. When a deadline bites, does the time for research and testing survive?
  6. After a launch, do you check whether people succeed more easily, not only whether traffic went up?
  7. Do complaints, reviews and support questions reach the people who design and build?
  8. Could sales, support and technical staff each describe your main customers and their biggest frustrations?
  9. Before launch, do you check that people with disabilities can use what you made?
  10. Do your leaders ask about the customer’s experience as often as about revenue and costs?
Score Stage What it usually looks like
0 to 5 Seed Good experiences happen by luck, or thanks to one person’s goodwill.
6 to 10 Shoot Real habits exist, but they are the first thing cut when time runs short.
11 to 15 Bud Routines repeat, someone owns them, and a few measures guide decisions.
16 to 20 Flower Users shape decisions, and people outside design make sound design choices.

A seed sits roughly near NN/g’s Absent stage and Spool’s Dark Ages; a flower near Integrated and Infused. Two cautions. The spread matters more than the total: if the owner scores 16 and whoever answers the phone scores 6, that gap is your first finding. And a score is not a grade: the IxDF calls UX maturity “a marker of progress or health”, and recommends reassessing at least once a year.

Growing one stage at a time

Nielsen Norman Group warns that leapfrogging levels is unrealistic, and that moving up even one can take several years. Spool, writing about teams at the very start, calls rushing “the biggest trap a design leader can encounter”. Gardeners know this: a plant does not grow faster when you pull on it.

From seed to shoot: let people see. Once a month, put a real customer in front of the people who decide: a visit, a call, a shared screen while they try one task. Then restate one business goal as a user goal, as Spool suggests; “more bookings” might become “people can book in two minutes on their phone”.

From shoot to bud: make it repeatable. Name an owner, even part-time, and write your principles on one page, as GDS did. Choose one upcoming project as a pilot: McKinsey found this brought far better financial results than improving design across the whole company at once. Before every launch, add two checks: a test with real people and an accessibility review.

From bud to flower: measure and share. Measure your users’ success, not only yours: the IxDF advises lean teams to pick one or two categories of Google’s HEART framework (happiness, engagement, adoption, retention, task success). France’s government publishes such scores every quarter for its essential online procedures, from user satisfaction to accessibility and clarity of language.

Invite two or three real customers to follow a project closely, as IBM does with its sponsor users, and ask leaders to spend time with clients, as one bank chief executive in McKinsey’s report does for a day each month. Then keep tending: NN/g observes that even mature organisations slip back when business metrics push user-centred thinking aside.

Look closer

My garden is my refuge and my lab, the place where I learn to notice details; nature turns out to be infinite once you look closely. A heartsease does not flower on command. It flowers when soil, light and water have been right for long enough, and a bud is already a flower, folded.

Organisations grow the same way: not through a grand transformation, but through afternoons like the one Airbnb’s founders spent with their listings, repeated until nobody remembers they were ever optional. So take a loupe to your own organisation this week:

  • Book one hour with three colleagues and answer the ten questions, alone first, then together.
  • Watch one customer try to do the one thing your website exists for.
  • Aim for the next stage, not the last, and book your next check-up for a year from now.

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