“I think in order to design great products, you need to have the culture in place.”
(Cordell-Ratzlaff, 2010)
User Experience Maturity is limited – and thereby determined – by the company’s internal attitudes and valuations.
(Kapanen, 2015)
Jussi Kapanen:
Measuring UX maturity
In this article – and using the linked material – I’ll share thoughts
1) on UX Maturity models
2) how to quickly evaluate a company’s
UX maturity without any formal maturity model.
Although I consider measuring UX maturity as important,
I recommend focusing your measures on the externally perceived UX .
Read my arguments. Then agree or disagree.
People mentioned in this article:
Timo Jokela. Author of dozens of academically reviewed papers, researcher of usability and usability maturity models.
Juhani Risku. Author of much more than just his famous book on Nokia. An excellent architect. And a real craftsman.
How mature are maturity models
In 1990s, the world was filled by Usability Maturity Models, and coming to 2000s, they turned to UX Maturity Models. *)
Different maturity models serve different purposes. Before looking at them, sit down and think. Are you going to evaluate Usability or UX or CX or Brand level phenomena? Do you want understand the output quality or the internal engine? For example, Brand perception or Brand management? End-users’ work or the User Centred Design process?
Here you have a few different UX Maturity models:
- UX Maturity model by Prachi Sakhardande and Rajiv Thanawala in http://uxpamagazine.org/ux-maturity-model/
- UX Maturity model by M Academian in http://www.macadamian.com/2015/08/20/indicators-of-user-experience-maturity/
- UX Maturity model by Yury Vetrov in http://www.uxmatters.com/mt/archives/2013/12/applied-ux-strategy-part-1-maturity-models.php
- UX Maturity model by Nielsen Norman Group in http://www.nngroup.com/articles/usability-maturity-stages-1-4/ *) Read the URL. Do you see what I mean 🙂
The above four were only a fraction of maturity models – why are there so many? To understand their differencies, I recommend the articles of Timo Jokela (http://www.joticon.fi/publicationstjokela.pdf). If you don’t want to read all of Timo’s papers, here you have a quick easy-reader:
- Various maturity models compared by Timo Jokela in http://uxpamagazine.org/usability_maturity_models/
First you learn what UX Maturity models are. Then you apply one. And finally, you’ll be discussing the learnings:
- Having a good UX Maturity Level does not guarantee great products. Having right raw materials and the right recipe does not guarantee a great meal.
- However, the knowledge that you will be assessed does change the organisation. What you measure is what you get.
And that leads us to the key question:What do you want to get?
Organisation or products?
Should you evaluate the internal UX maturity or the external user perceived quality? I have organised both kinds of evaluations and seen their effects. Surely, to become competitive by UX, you’ll need to understand both the internal causes and the external effects. You need both. But in the real world, resources are limited. You are forced to choose.
What do you want to get? An organisation that looks and feels good – or an product that looks and feels good? I recommend focusing on the products.
The choice is easy: Always focus first on the user perceived quality. Why so? Is it not more important to understand the root causes, not just the outputs that vary anyway from project to project?
Assume you walk to the management team and show data of a company’s UX Maturity Level. What happens?
They thank for you sharing the information which was nothing knew for them. They have created the processes and resources that you just described from a narrow viewpoint. Whatever the UX maturity level, they won’t see any need to change. “That’s the way we do products, and we are doing well this way.”
And what if you instead show data of the company’s products as perceived by real users, comparing them against competitors’ products?
They listen to you, looking intensively at the charts. The management team thanks you for confirming issues that some members have been worryied about for some time but they were missing the hard evidence. They start to demand for actions to improve the next products. Somebody is asked to prepare an action plan.
No, I did not say this is psychology. The presentations were just faced by rational logic. Input the same information to an AI system, and its logical response would give the same as from the management teams above.
The company’s goal is a better UX, right? By definition, UX exists only in the users’ minds. The UX can thus, by definition, not be assessed by studying anything within your company.
I did recommend focusing first on the externally perceived output. Also the internal UX Maturity Assessments are highly recommended. Why? Because Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle applies also on human scale: Whatever you measure, you influence those being measured. As soon as the management team decideds that the user perceived product quality must improve, they’ll look for internal changes. They’ll ask for a roadmap. The subsequent UX Maturity Levels are a perfect roadmap.
So now you run your UX maturity evaluations.
In order to have a good experience of anything, your expectations should preferably be too low, and never too high. I want to ensure your first UX maturity evaluations become a good experience. Thus I will next adjust your expectations a bit downwards.
Many UX maturity models are checklists: does your company have this and that. To be qualified for Maturity Level N, you must have enough thises and thats. And if the process includes the UCD steps and if there are enough persons whose job titles have the prefix “UX” combined with diverse enough suffixes, then things are told to be fine.
Unfortunately, having the right pieces does not guarantee a good outcome. Great processes and people are just prerequisites. First the attitudes determine the usage of those capabilities.
Attitude.
I believe in the power of individuals, thus I used above the word ‘attitude’. Those who want to underline the organisational aspect, use the word ‘culture’, like Cordell-Ratzlaff in the title quote. We talk about the same phenomena, just look at it on different levels.
Whether looking at the ‘attitude of individuals’ or the ‘culture of an organisation’, the lines between UX-hostile and UX-friendly individual/organisations are the same. One such line goes between accepting and promoting UX:
Many companies do accept UX work as an inevitable cost on the way to good products. Some leading companies think differently. For them, UX work is not a cost but the most profitable investment to bring in the highest yields: The better you know your users and the better you fulfil their needs, the more successful your products. To think this way or not, that’s a matter of attitudes and valuations. I claim that
User Experience Maturity is
limited – and thereby determined – by
the company’s internal attitudes and valuations.
If the attitude is right, all the needed factors – processes, time, money and people needed to do the UX work – will grow as soon as they are needed. The phenomena is principally the same no matter the company size:
If the CEO requires the output to be a great product and if his subordinates want to fulfil that goal, the possibly missing pieces will be found. If a craftsman running a one-man company is devoted to his work, the outcome can turn to superb user experiences. No UX strategies were needed, nor any understanding of usability heuristics or cognitive affordancies.
And vice versa: If the decision-makers don’t see UX as a key goal, all the efforts to bring in benchmark UCD processes or world-class design talents are likely to be waste of time. As decision-makers, I count the whole chain from the CEO to the people who define and execute the product. In this chain, the weakest link defines the UX maturity.
The weakest link defines it all.
Or the strongest.
A former Nokia director Juhani Risku analysed Nokia’s management principles and strategies in 2010 in a book titled as “Uusi Nokia – käsikirjoitus” (published by Differ Books 2010, ISBN 9789526736914). In this book, Risku crystallized the reasons behind Nokia’s collapse:
In Nokia, there were many people along a product’s development path who had the power to say No to an idea.
There was not a single person in the organisation with the power to say Yes.
Consequently, the innovative concepts for game-changer products watered along the development path to merely copies of the earlier years’ products.
Having been an insider in Nokia in those years, I regard this culture as a major reason for Nokia to lose the product leadership in mobile phones.
Why do we still enjoy the experience of seeing astronauts walking in the moon in 1968? Because in 1962, one decision-maker with enough power said: “We will go to the moon in this decade.” Those words were UX management.
Identify the strongest link
Fast way to evaluate a company’s UX maturity: Ask the leadership what UX means for them. Do they think it is just about the visual appearance? Something in the user interface design? If all key decision-makers understand User Experience is a mindset in the users’ heads, affected by all the company touch point encountered by users, then the company maturity is above zero.
(Just coincidently, while I was writing this, Huffington Post tweeted a link to their fresh article about “do all business leaders fully understand the importance of customer experience” )
Then ask the Chief Design Officer how the UX ranks against other business drivers: Does it affect the critical decisions – not just those of product development but also recruiting, marketing, production, any function that may somehow affect the output of the company.
Often, you won’t find any Chief Design Officer. Or not even an Experience Director. You may hear there is nobody above middle-management has focused on user perceived quality. Then draw your conclusions. This rule applies to any function: If a company doesn’t have any top manager responsible for an issue – be it Finance, HR, Marketing, UX, whatsoever – then the company is not taking that domain seriously.
If the top half of the organisation has no person focusing on a topic, then the company’s maturity on that topic is in the bottom half.
But hey, you may ask, isn’t it the team of UX experts who make the actual work? Why am I focusing on finding the top end of the chain? Because that end defines the overall maturity of the company. Wherever in the organisation you place the UX driving force, from that position downwards UX gets more important. In nature, it is rare to have anything flowing upstream. Which is by the way the reason for flat organisations being so much more creative.
OK, we have UX Maturity evaluated. It is excellent.
Let the common case example concretize the pitfalls of UX Maturity: Nokia.
Around the millennium, external observers were unified in their opinion: Nokia’s UX maturity is high. Also internally this seemed to be the case. Hundreds of people had UX in their job titles, replacing the Usability of their previous decade’s job titles. Doctoral level UX research was active. On top strategy slides, the term “UX” was just as strong as the “usability” was before.
Nokia Learning Centre (part of HR organization) provided a large number of internal courses for usability and UX. I lectured some of those courses, and together with HR people we planned a full system of courses, looking always for the best talents to run them. To boost the organization, Nokia invited the UX gurus from all over the world, from Ginny Redish to Marc Hassenzahl.
The idea generators of Nokia were Nokia Research Center and Nokia Design. I was not part of them, however my desk was in the middle of their working space, so I feel insightful enough to assess their work:
Both NRC and ND proposed dramatically better products than Nokia was known of. NRC was top-class in technology research – inventing and prototyping for example touch displays, head-mounted VR displays or digital payments years before I encountered these topics in public technology papers. These organisations and their individuals did just as ground-breaking work in for example ethnography, researching the needs of children to produce music in Middle-African villages, or the needs of Indian fishermen to find buyers for the fresh catches.
Shortly, Nokia’s NRC and ND teams developed product concepts that would have shifted Nokia from leadership to superb leadership if productized.
Think about for example the tablet with touch UI. A colleague of mine was responsible for its usability tests around 2005. The device was evaluated to be not just technically mature but also attractive to consumers. The effort of world-class interaction design, visual design and technology teams was ready. And buried. In 2010, Apple was the first company to launch a touch tablet. How is it possible that products like this were never productized by Nokia? Nokia had all the needed: it was the industry leader in technical knowledge, development resources, manufacturing power, market presence.
How high is the UX Maturity of a company
that can’t bring out products with
Wow, How and Show – referring to
the Nokia UX goals of those days?
The process of turning great ideas into mediocre products was hardcoded in the organization. Sooner or later, every great product proposal came across a No-man.
One “No” blocked the Nokia from moving to touch phones. Another “No” stopped the progress of Nokia tablets. (Yes, I have discussed with the person who said No to touch phones. No, I didn’t dare to ask about that decision.) Years later, Apple entered the market with the iPhone and still later the iPad. The Apple users’ experience was all that counted afterwards.
The No decision for touch phones was made in the upper half of the organisation. It was an that good idea that it went that far. Smaller great ideas stopped typically much earlier. Improvements to phone UIs were stopped by middle-management who replaced user perceived quality by cost-effectiveness and deadlines. These managers did nothing wrong: they just followed their orders, the business metrics, cutting costs and increasing effectiveness of producing the next phone model.
Having become a usability apostle in mid-90s, I started to develop and promote Usability Metrics in 1996 claiming that “What you measure is what you get”. Later in 2000s, I learned that Kaplan and Norton had launched the very same principle in the “The Balanced Scorecard” already in 1992. The bosses of that time did surely read Kaplan. Kaplan’s concerns – and generally, most contemporary business management metrics – do not include usability nor user experience issues. The wider bubble of CX may be included, but its measures relate often to CRM and comms issues, less to the core touchpoint: the product.
What you measure is what you get.
To evaluate the UX Maturity of a company,
just check how strong is UX’s weight
on the bonus matrix of the company’s leaders.
Look at the power
Companies often communicate their UX orientation by telling they have a high-rank leader who manages this domain. This person is often on Tier 2 of the organisation. Having someone somewhere, once again, may be a prerequisite but it does not guarantee anything.
Once again, Nokia. In Nokia management team, there was a Chief Design Officer on Tier 2, right below the top man. The CDO was well empowered with strong resources, heading personally the Nokia Design. However, the scope of CDO was in practice limited to physical characteristics of the products. For example, when I suggested in 1999 that Nokia Design would have a role in developing UI Design Guidelines, the CDO told he would love to but unfortunately UI design is not in his nor Nokia Design’s scope. In practice, the perception within Nokia was that nobody in Tiers 1-2 of Nokia organisation focused on UX, whereas Apple had their strongest UX force, Steve Jobs, on Tier 1.
The consequences were inevitable. Nokia gradually lost its leading market position because Apple delivered better and better UX. Looking at Nokia strategies, you would have thought UX was important. Looking at Nokia organisation, you would have seen the truth right away:
To evaluate the UX Maturity of a company,
just check on which organisation level is
the highest ranked UX focused person.
The job title of that person is not important. This person is anyone with a UX oriented attitude, sitting in a leading position. The UX leader might be a craftsman entrepreneur who is devoted to fulfil the customers’ needs with the best products. It could be a CEO like Steve Jobs (Apple, computers) or Armi Ratia (Marimekko, clothing). What matters is the share of the organisation that this leader influences.
I claim that UX can not be evaluated by looking at organisational characteristics, such as processes, structures, competence areas or resources. UX is always about individual persons:
Evaluating the capability to produce good UX
requires understanding the mindsets
of individual persons:
the decision-makers.
Evaluating the UX of your products
requires understanding the mindset
of individual persons:
the users.
Looking forward for your comments.