Meryem Ghatrif
Meryem Ghatrif

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ghatrif.meriem@gmail.com

Pensées · UX strategy

How mature is UX in your organisation?

A ten-question UX maturity check to run with your team in under an hour, mapped to Frank Spillers’ seven stages.

5 min read

In 2009, Airbnb’s founders were stuck at $200 a week. Joe Gebbia saw what their New York listings had in common: poor photos. Paul Graham’s advice was not technical. Go to New York, spend time with the hosts, replace the photos. A week later, as Gebbia tells it, weekly revenue had doubled to $400.

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

What maturity measures

UX maturity is not a verdict on how pretty your website is. Nielsen Norman Group defines it as “an organization’s desire and ability to successfully deliver user-centered design”. In plain words, it is how your organisation decides, and whether real people have a say.

In a 2018 study of 300 listed companies over five years, McKinsey found that 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, but a telling one.

I learned to look at maturity this way in Frank Spillers’ course on UX management, at the Interaction Design Foundation. He founded the consultancy Experience Dynamics.

A lifecycle, not a grade

Spillers describes maturity as a lifecycle in seven stages:

  1. UX Grounded: UX is still a foreign term.
  2. Kick-off: management wants better UX, without a clear strategy yet.
  3. Skunkworks: one-off UX projects, with mixed results.
  4. Align: project teams build UX into the way they work, and learn to prioritise needs.
  5. Peak: UX activities become routine, with a budget of their own.
  6. Culture: UX is adopted across the organisation, with a dedicated budget and an empowered team.
  7. User-Centered Enterprise: UX is built into everything, systematically.

He is honest about all such models, his own included, which “may be interesting but not always practical”. I read them as a way to start a conversation, not as a grade.

Every stage has its trap

Each stage has its own way of getting stuck. At the Skunkworks stage, projects succeed one by one but nothing spreads; Spillers calls it “wheel spinning”. At the Align stage, demand stretches a small UX team too thin, the trap he calls “slash and burn”. Naming the trap before you fall into it is already half the work.

Start from where you really are

Before planning anything, assess honestly where you stand. Here is the check I put together for that, to run with your team 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. Do decision-makers watch a real customer use your website, product or service at least once a month?
  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?

Add up each person’s points, then read where you probably are:

  • 0 to 5: UX Grounded or Kick-off. Watch out for good intentions without a plan.
  • 6 to 10: Skunkworks. Watch out for wheel spinning, with projects that work but never spread.
  • 11 to 15: Align or Peak. Watch out for slash and burn, with a small team stretched too thin.
  • 16 to 20: Culture and beyond. Watch out for slipping back when deadlines push users aside.

This scale is mine, a rough guide to his stages rather than his audit. 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 the score will move; the IxDF recommends reassessing your maturity at least once a year.

Grow one stage at a time

You do not need to climb all seven stages at once. The path from his course is simple. Assess where you are, compare how you work today with how you would like to work, plan the steps between the two, and track your progress with a scorecard. Aim for the next stage, not the last:

  • If you are just starting: once a month, put a real customer in front of the people who decide, through a visit, a call or a shared screen while they try one task.
  • If projects succeed but stay isolated: name an owner, even part-time, write your principles on one page, and repeat what worked on the next project.
  • If a small team is stretched thin: protect time for research and testing in every plan, and track one or two measures of your users’ success, such as how many complete their main task.

Nielsen Norman Group warns that moving up even one level can take several years.

Look closer

A heartsease does not flower on command. It flowers when soil, light and water have been right for long enough.

Organisations grow the same way, not through a grand transformation but through weeks like the one Airbnb’s founders spent with their hosts, 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.

If you run the check with your team, I’d be glad to hear where your gaps were.

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