Growing the maturity of UX Research at your company

Have you ever thought about the quality and effectiveness of the user research (or UX) practice at your current company? Or where your company stands in terms of how you are currently using user research? Or, most importantly, what level you are on and how to get to the next level of user research?

I think about this all the time. Processes, frameworks and how I am currently running user research can sometimes keep me up at night. The other day, I decided it was time to actually put my questions and thoughts into a framework, which was when I was introduced to the concept of UX maturity and UX maturity models

What is UX Maturity?

UX maturity is as it sounds: it is, essentially, how mature your organization is when it comes to dealing with UX and user research practices. For the purpose of this article, I am going to focus specifically on user research. Fortunately for all of us, the area of UX maturity has been researched, and there have been some wonderful resources created in this space, such as UX maturity models.

A UX maturity model enables a company to do exactly what I mentioned above: assess how mature a company is with their user research.

For me, UX maturity models are a really helpful guide in understanding the purpose of user research in a company, whether it is non-existent, a tool to validate design decisions, a way to discover new insights, a method to innovate or a combination of the above (the good ones, usually).

A model like this gives you a clear framework, allowing you to actually understand where you currently lie on the UX maturity scale, and what you have to do in order to get to the next steps.

Generally, the more UX research mature a company is, the more likely that are to fight for including user research in their business.

What can assessing UX maturity do for you? Aka: why does it matter?

Assessing where your company currently lies within a UX maturity model is important for several reasons:

1. Obtain a greater understanding about how much buy-in user research currently has in your organization
2. You acquire action items for what you need to do as a user researcher to move the company in a more user-centric direction
3. Helps gain buy-in by approaching user research in the most appropriate way for your organization

How to assess UX maturity

UX maturity models tend to have five or six different levels, depending on which you are looking at. Here are the most common hierarchies of UX research maturity:

1. Absence/Unawareness of UX Research: The organization is basically unaware of user research, and the value of conducting research. There is an absence of processes and movement in user research
2. UX Research Awareness — Ad Hoc Research: There is an awareness of user research, but it is commonly misunderstood as a tool to validate changes, or to “make something look pretty.” Oftentimes, there will be ad hoc research requests that come very late in the pipeline
3. Adoption of UX research into projects: This is where UX research comes into projects earlier than in stage two, and starts to become part of whatever development cycle the team is using
4. Maturing of UX research into an organizational focus: User research becomes part of the organizational process, and has its own place in the organization. Teams and stakeholders are bought in, and ensure research is done, when necessary
5. Integrated UX research across strategy: Instead of simply informing minor aesthetic changes, or being used to validate changes, user research is able to inform product strategy, as well as other strategies across the organization (ex: marketing, brand, etc.)
6. Complete UX research culture: Where every user researcher wants their organization to be: the entire company is research-centric and driven by a need to understand users. UX is an integral part of the organization’s thinking process at every level

There are many models available to use, such as the one below, used by GetYourGuide. This model is a great way to get started in determining, at a high-level, where the UX maturity lies at your organization.

Once you get this overview of the UX maturity, you can dive in a little deeper, using this more detailed model by Nasdaq:

This particular maturity model can end up looking more like a bingo board, with some areas may be more mature than others, which is why I love this particular model, and have used it at the company I currently work for. I identified our overall maturity using the first model, but I knew Nasdaq’s model would work better for us, specifically, because we were further along in some areas than others. This is what it looked like when I was done:

After I went through and completed this model, I had very clear insight into what I had to do next:

1. We had to move more into the direction of discovery research — I currently run generative research studies regularly, but there is a lot more work I need to do in terms of education, and how to work alongside our squads with this discovery research
2. I want to start beta and pilot programs as soon as we have new concepts applicable for these types of methodologies
3. We need to up our data collection and analytics game when it comes to user research metrics (such as time on task, task success). With this, I am currently working on a heuristic evaluation, and we are going to start recruitment for a benchmarking study
4. As we have recently started discovery research, we still need to create outputs that foster shared understanding throughout the team, such as personas, user journeys, user scenarios, comic storyboard, etc
5. I would really like to start making sure the research is integrated throughout all the different departments — as of right now, I am just trying to make sure each squad is introduced to the concept of research, and the finding we have so far. As time goes by, I will be holding more synthesis meetings and presentations that include other departments. This is a particular focus for me this coming quarter
6. Finally, I would like to focus on creating more frameworks and processes across user research — right now, we have best practices and an overall idea of how we want user research to work, but I would like to ingrain research into the squads in a very obvious and easy-to-follow way

Although I already had an idea that this was the work I needed to do to help user research level up, it was certainly helpful to map out where we currently lie on a pre-defined model, where I could easily see what the next step would look like. With this, I made my plan for the upcoming year, which is a bit optimistic (the ones with the glow are where I would like to be):

As I am currently the sole researcher on the team, I am hoping to accomplish as much as I can with this model in the upcoming year, and will post an update of our new maturity then. I can’t say enough how helpful this simple exercise was, and I really encourage you to give it a try!

See the original post, based off of a recent ResearchOps Berlin Meetup