In a recent team meeting, my coworker brought up the “Stages of UX Maturity” in regards to where our company (Northwestern Mutual), and different departments within it, might be situated on that spectrum. While our team, and the larger design org, is doing okay at leveraging buzzwords like design-thinking and user research, we still have mountains to climb in the not-so-distant corners of the company.

It feels like things should be different by now… even Hanna-Barbara envisioned us living in SeaLabs by 2020, but we still have to fight for our users and conducting basic research when making product / design decisions. It can be infuriating, and it’s tempting to blame our colleagues for being ignorant or worse, stupid. What we tend to forget is that for a large number of people, products just appear.

Capitalism has turned us into consumers rather than creators, so we buy everything we own. When things break, we don’t repair them, we replace them… and I’d bet most of us don’t know a single person who goes into a factory to build something we see on Target’s red and white shelves. InstaPot’s and KitchenAid’s may as well be divine gifts to the average American; falling from heaven like mana in the Bible.

That’s because our late-capitalist world relies on planned obsolescence to maintain it’s unsustainable growth. When our situation is viewed through that lens, of course we fight an uphill battle because we’ve become accustomed to bad experiences and don’t know to expect better. Worse, our colleagues haven’t been truly exposed to the process of creation (thanks to art programs being underfunded and ripped out of schools, but that’s a whole other post), and they don’t have a clue about how research informs design.

We can’t solve this overnight, and it may never be fixed forever. UX education, and evangelism, is our Sisyphean task; if we don’t keep pushing for something better, our metaphorical rock will forever be stuck at the hill’s base.

So, how do we make progress? Slowly and methodically.

The Nielson-Norman Group’s page about this tells us that, “improving UX maturity requires growth and evolution across several different factors, including:

Strategy: UX leadership, planning, and resource prioritization

Culture: UX knowledge and cultivating UX careers and practitioners’ growth

Process: the systematic use of UX research and design methods

Outcomes: intentionally defining and measuring the results produced by UX work.“

https://www.nngroup.com/articles/ux-maturity-model/

It’s easy to look at that and think, “four items? Easy peasy!” but the field has been around for decades, and every company I’ve worked for is stuck in the early stages of UX maturity. That’s because our practice doesn’t spread like wildfire. Education and cross-team collaboration efforts can only take us so far before new hires and retention issues put us right back at square one.

The rest of this post will be some of my various thoughts and experiences on how to implement the kind of changes that stick (even after you’re gone). And, since my brain works like this, I’ll start at the early stages and move towards full maturity.

1. Absent

Ignored, Non-existent, Undiscovered

In some ways, this is the easiest place to enter. Not because it’s easy to get quick UX wins and change minds/hearts, but because there aren’t any misconceptions working against you. Lots of places heard about how design needed a seat at the table from industry giants in the 2010s, and the negative side of that is a lot of those designers were not made for sitting at that particular table.

I’m a rare weirdo that holds two bachelors degrees… one is a BA in Philosophy from a liberal arts college, the other a BFA from an Art & Design institution. What was emphasized in those programs was radically different; if you’re a designer or artist, your higher education is more closely aligned to a tech school than a liberal arts college. What that means, is that many designers are great at their craft, but never developed soft-skills or critical thinking beyond their “god-given” range. That’s led to a lot of people juggling very separate workloads, burning out, and talking down to others who didn’t immediately value their work or voice (this has happened from within, and from dealing with outside agencies/consultants).

Either way, a lot of jobs above this level come with unwinding bad experiences and assumptions, whereas that void of all UX maturity can be a refreshing (albeit daunting) task.

The important thing to do here is be a teacher, mentor, coach, and cheerleader. Celebrate every small win, focus on the most achievable victories, and make partnerships with friendly faces from any department you can. A few good champions for the user can make a world of change happen over time but you’re looking at the trees instead of the forest.

2. Limited

Uneven, Haphazard, Aspirational

If I’m totally honest with myself, most workplaces I’ve been at are somewhere around this stage. At this level of limited UX maturity, there is a surface-level understanding that human-centered design is important, but you will still be fighting for the budget and a timeline that allows you to do real research or usability testing. That lack of budget/time isn’t done on purpose, but it stems from the misconception that since employees know their product inside and out, and many interface with real users on a day-to-day basis, they consider their opinions to be the same as an end-users.

In this scenario, they think a cursory overview from internal stakeholders is all you need, and the impact is drastic. In the worst case scenario, the only people “testing” your work are biased because of insider knowledge that users do not have. In the best case scenario, your testing pool only consists of power-users, and everyone else is left out.

Both, however, lead to bad data which lead to wrong decisions. Why? Because no matter how you slice it, you’ve injected a huge amount of bias to your testing pool and even the best analyst / researcher can’t see through that cloud to find a truth.

This level often means you’re doing your best to follow UX practices whenever you can, and using real analytics to validate the extra time or budget spent weeks or months down the road. As you get more little wins piling up, you sense the tide of battle changing, but I urge you not to push this too fast or you can easily become overworked and slip into bad habits in order to meet deadlines.

3. Emergent

Functional & Promising, Inconsistent, Inefficient

Do you have some design leadership at the company? Are there more than a handful of UX folks doing planning, research, and design work? Do you have a pattern library but not a full design-system with tokens and variables setup by developers?

If so, all signs point to your company being at this stage.

At this level and beyond, it’s not a single person that’s making a big impact; it’s their teams. This is where you’ll start hearing about “design ops.” It’s a buzzword that means people are actually designing the systems to level-up your team and it’s members. That means adding structure to the formless void of internal job titles, documenting your expert’s input on various topics, and operationalizing the chores of training, mentoring, interviewing, and onboarding so that everyone gets a similar experience.

The best way to help as an individual contributor at this stage is to grow yourself by absorbing all you can from the leaders, take up any chance to learn more, and if you’ve got an idea for improvements let your leaders know (and help make it happen).

4. Structured

Partly systemic, Variably effective

This stage and the one before it are fairly connected. Think of this as the awkward middle stage of a Pokemon’s evolution. Sure, this stage has better stats and cooler moves, but it’s not fully grown.

5. Integrated

Comprehensive, Pervasive, Universal

Honestly, at this point, I’d love to see anywhere operating at this stage consistently. The problem with pushing a huge boulder up a hill is that if you stumble, fall, or lose momentum, it’s probably gonna roll backwards and hurt some people. If you’re at this level, we all envy you but also… it’s gotta be a lot of “design ops” work that’s keeping things from crumbling.

6. User-driven

Beloved, Reproduceable, Habitual

No one is at this stage yet. If someone you know think’s they are, they’re lying to themselves.

Some of these steps have more content than others, but that’s due to my own experience with them. I’d love to hear your thoughts and experiences as well in the comments because sharing helps us learn from each other and grow the practice as a whole.

Keep up the good fight, never confuse yourself for your users, and if you’re talking about usability remember not to ignore accessibility and inclusion.

No community is a monolith, and yes, that includes your users.