Corporate UX Maturity

This all started when I read an article written in 2006 by the Nielsen Norman Group; ‘Corporate UX Maturity’. In this two part article they outlined the various stages a company must go through to understand the value and accept the importance of building software products that have been designed with the user’s experience as the main driving force.

This scale has eight stages ranging from general hostility towards usability through to what they call a ‘User-Driven Corporation’, i.e. a company that builds products centred around the users, a company that has User Centred Design (I will use ‘UCD’ from now on) from top to bottom with business processes and services that align to that same thinking.

What the Nielsen Norman Group are describing, as they put it, can take an established company decades to move from immature to mature. Possibly even doubling that time to progress to, what I’ll call the ‘nirvana state’, stage eight.

That was true eleven years ago and for many established companies is still very true today. However, what we see now are thousands of small to medium sized companies who understand the value of UCD right from the beginning of their existence.

These companies have founders with a wealth of experience at companies who have been at various stages of the maturity scale, they’ve been through the struggle and seen plenty of failure along the way. Even if they’re not from a specific design background they still understand the importance of having someone on board to drive a UCD process forward. Furthermore, as these companies grow they are hiring influential Directors of UX or Design who have a presence at board meetings with investors or shareholders.

This essentially means that many companies are starting off, at the very least stage five and in some cases stage seven or even eight.

So this is a great thing right? With an increasing number of UCD mature companies it’s not only great for customers and the businesses serving them, but for designers too. If more companies have an understanding of the value UCD can bring that surely means there’s more demand for designers in the industry.

Well, maybe that’s not necessarily true…