The Five Stages of UX Design Practice

I’m a huge fan of Intercom, and everything they publish (their Intercom on Onboarding ebook is especially helpful). A few weeks ago on my way to work, I was listening to an episode with Jared Spool, formerly of User Interface Engineering (UIE), a leading UX consulting firm, and now co-founder of Center Centre, a UX design school positioned as a trade-style alternative to higher ed.

I’m particularly interested in new ways to prepare people for careers in UX and design, having taught those subjects at General Assembly for over a year, but it was Jared’s assessment of the evolution of the role that UX plays in an organization, broken out into five stages, that caught my attention:

Stage 1: UX Dark Ages

“…an organization that has never thought about UX, they don’t talk about UX, they’re about doing the thing they do. They sell gasoline, but they don’t think about how people use gasoline.”

Stage 2: Spot UX

“You bring in somebody and they work on UX for a while, and then you send them away. Or maybe you have a manager who drives a UX project until the rest of the organization overtakes them, and then they get fed up and they leave. There’s no concerted UX phase.”

Stage 3: Internal UX Service

“Instead of using outside agencies, we’re going to bring that in house and we’re going to create this service that basically replicates what the outside agencies were doing for us, but at a much cheaper rate. That’s what we call design as a service. It’s UX design as a service inside the organization.

“A lot of people have thought for a long time that was the ultimate evolution. It turns out that as we’ve been studying companies, that’s not it at all. That’s actually a midpoint.”

Stage 4: Embedded UX

“The next stage is when a team that the service has been servicing, realizes that design is actually critical to their success. They get frustrated hiring that team for spot pieces as they go. Instead they hire people from the team to actually be embedded in the project.

“The difference is embedded people only work on that project. They think about multiple releases of that product. Design as a service is only thinking about the current release and they are only working on parts of the project. There are whole parts that they have nothing to do with and no control over and no influence over. The designers now have influence over this.”

Stage 5: UX Design Infusion

“The last stage is what we call a design-infused organization, where everybody sees themselves as a UX person. The performance engineers, the product managers, the lawyers who create the license agreements, everybody has some influence over the user experience and is actively working to provide the best user experience possible.

“The example I like to give is Netflix. There are people who are in charge of making sure that the bits come off the server as fast as possible. They worry about responsiveness and bandwidth and reliability. They’re typically engineers, and their job is to make the servers and the network perform as fast as it can. Conventionally, we would never have referred to them as UX people. They don’t have anything to do with UX. They work on the back end. The moment you’re watching your favorite movie and the little spinner starts to spin, and your movie stops and nothing happens, suddenly they’re UX people. They are the most important UX people on the team in that moment.

“The UX tipping point is when you go away from having the conventional approach of shipping a product at the very moment that it’s technically capable of doing what we want it to do and meets the business model. ‘If it does those two things we ship it. We don’t worry if the design isn’t great, we’ll fix it in the next release.’

“You stop shipping products, not because it technically doesn’t work or the business model isn’t met, but because it’s not designed well enough for your standards. You actually use design to hold up your product. There aren’t a lot of companies that have reached this tipping point. The ones who have met this are producing a much higher grade of product. As a result, they command higher revenues, they command higher prices, and they get more customer loyalty. They win on all the factors.”

He goes on to summarize how design can help an organization compete:

“Design is really the last ground to compete on. Technology is an even bar. You can get all the technology you want and most of it is in the cloud. You can come out with the cheapest product, but cheap doesn’t give you a lot of margin. Competition can come up with something cheaper, which means you have to lower your prices. So you’re always in this game of seeing who can drive their costs down. You can produce the highest quality product, but reliability, maintainability, those sorts of things are now basic stakes. So what’s left? The user experience. Being able to compete on a user experience.”

What stage of UX design is your organization at? Where do you want it to be?