Increasing an Organization’s UX Design Maturity: Our Not-So-Secret Sauce

Better UX design maturity makes an organization more competitive and more effective at delivering great products and services. While this is easy to say, we’ve seen this is not easy for key executives and stakeholders to understand. Without that understanding, organizations rarely improve.

During the past 30 years, we’ve tried many approaches to increase the executives’ and stakeholders’ understanding. Most approaches have failed. While they’ll often nod their head knowingly, nothing will change in the organization. They proceed to do what they’ve always done and get the same results they’ve always gotten.

Recently, we’ve seen this change. We’ve hit upon an approach that goes beyond idealistic head-nodding. An approach that creates change in the organization. Change that improves the user experience of the organization’s product and services, which in turn, allows the organization to meet the goals of being competitive and effective.

The Not-So-Secret Sauce

We could keep our approach secret. But that’s not who we are.

Instead, we tell everyone. So, here’s how we help organizations increase their UX design maturity. Here are the ingredients for our not-so-secret sauce:

• shared vision
• immersive exposure
• continual learning

The ingredients of our not-so-secret sauce are how we help UX design leaders gain their executive and key stakeholder buy-in. When those executives see the common vision for what the products and services could be, they get excited about making it happen. When the stakeholders are deeply exposed to who the users are and what those users currently experience, they see what needs to be done to reach the vision. Once the executives and stakeholders have that understanding, they’re more likely to put their role power, influence, and resources into growing the organization and learning how to achieve it.

Empowering the UX Design Leader

Think of a sportsball game. In sportsball, when your team runs onto the sportsball field, your team’s leadership must focus on two objectives: scoring a bunch and preventing the other team from scoring a bunch. Everything your leadership and your team does needs to be in service of those two objectives.

If they want their organization to be more mature, UX Design leaders also must focus on objectives: creating the shared visions, delivering immersive exposure, and creating a culture of continual learning. Everything they and their team does needs to be in the service of these three objectives.

We Start with a Shared Experience Vision

What will the experience of using our awesome product or service be like 5 years from now?

This is the question we teach UX design leaders to start with. We tell them: Let’s assume we can deliver something awesome that your customers will love. What’s will be different in their life when they have your awesome product or service?

We’re starting with the end in mind. We’re painting a picture. We then work to have everyone in the organization to fall in love with it. (If they don’t, we keep tweaking it until they do.)

The beauty of starting with vision is it plays to our strengths. Great UX design leaders are inherently great storytellers. The vision is a great story.

The experience vision makes our customers and users into superheroes, with our products or services becoming their superpowers. Everybody loves a good superhero story, especially when it involves cool superpowers.

What makes a great experience vision work is how it shows, without telling, what the power of good design is. Anyone who is familiar with what our current customers and users go through will immediately see how a better designed product or service improves their lives.

With an experience vision, we don’t have to bore people with how our design process works. We start by painting a picture of a beautiful, desirable future. The executives and stakeholders will want to shout “We want that! How do we get it?” That’s how we’ll know we’ve succeeded.

Deliver Immersive Exposure

What’s the experience we’re currently delivering to our customers and users?

UX design leaders have known for years about the power of watching users and how those users experience our products and services. There are a few things that motivate change more than watching a user struggle to accomplish a goal we thought would be easy because of our design.

Yet, guided by some wacky notion of efficiency and job protection, many organizations have put their UX research team between the people who truly need the motivation and the users who will motivate them. Isolating the executives and stakeholders from users works against us.

Instead, we’ve been showing UX design leaders a myriad of techniques to get those executives and stakeholder directly exposed to the users and their struggles. Every time these folks are exposed to seeing the users, it builds a desire to make those users’ lives better.

That desire plays right into the vision, which cements the mission. Now the executives and stakeholders are on board with the idea. They can see what needs to change between experience present to get to experience future.

Create a Culture of Continual Learning

What does our organization need to learn to deliver great products and services in the future?

Armed with an understanding of what needs to change, the executives and stakeholders now turn to the UX design leaders to discover how to execute. It’s rare that an organization is currently well equipped to make the change. If they were, they would’ve already achieved their vision.

In UX design, we shouldn’t measure progress by the designs we’ve produced. Sure, producing great designs is better than not producing them. However, you only produce a design once, then you move on.

We’ve seen that smart UX design leaders measure their progress by how much their organization has learned. What do they know about their users? What do they know about their products or services? What do they know about the users’ unsolved problems and challenges?

How has that knowledge and understanding changed from before? That’s the sign of real UX design progress. The more the organization has a deep understanding of the challenges and struggles of its customers and users, the more the organization can work to eliminating those struggles and overcoming those challenges.

Increasing the UX Design Maturity

That’s what makes an organization competitive in the marketplace. That’s what makes the organization’s delivery of services more effective.

Those smart UX design leaders not only help their own team learn these things, they work to help the entire organization learn them. They use what they learn from their immersive exposure efforts to identify what those challenges and struggles are. They use the shared understanding of the experience vision to point out what life could be like for customers and users.

This is the not-so-secret sauce that increases the organization’s UX design maturity. With every baby step, the organization gets just a little closer to being more effective. It’s solid design leadership that gets them there.