Your products and services are delivering an experience to your customers regardless if you are consciously managing them. A good experience delights customers and generates a steady revenue stream while a poor experience sends customers to the competition and can be the demise of an organization. Savvy organizations understand their experience design maturity, invest in developing their experience design strategy and make it central to their overall organizations’ objectives.
A UX Maturity Model is a framework that describes an organization’s experience design maturity along a continuum. It defines where an organization is and provides the instructions to reach the next level. The model also provides a benchmark for your organization and relative comparison to other organizations.
User experience maturity varies from organizations that are just becoming aware to the concepts of user experience to organizations where user experience is one of their core distinctions if not the core distinction. There are five levels defined along the continuum of user experience maturity starting at the initial level of no user experience management to customer focused organization. Organizations progress through a sequence of stages as their user experience management processes evolve and mature. You can match your organization with the following descriptions to see what your next stage is likely to be.
Because user experience has become so important to organizations’ success in the marketplace and their revenue, it is now part of their overall business strategy. Smart organizations plan how to manage and measure the experience they deliver. Most organizations have some system for managing their strategy and measuring their progress toward achieving their goals.
A UX strategy scorecard helps you map your user experience process and skills to your organization’s customer and financial growth. It helps you communicate your UX strategic objectives with alignment with your organizations objectives. Executive leaders love this. This is how you make the case for new hires, process improvement and other resources.
For each perspective (financial, customer, process and people) there might be many objectives. Objectives for user experience could include user research, design reviews, and usability evaluation among other user experience activities. Customer objectives like increasing conversions, retention, and wallet share map to increasing revenue and reduced cycle time; reducing training and support costs maps to the financial objectives of reducing costs. Depending on your organization’s overall strategy, you could break down the User Experience Scorecard to match your organization’s exact needs.
Where is your organization along your experience maturity? How does your experience design strategy align and serve your organization’s overall objectives?