Business: UX Maturity

In a perfect world, companies would take a systematic approach to product design from their very first days. But, in reality, early product design efforts can be sporadic for various reasons—for instance, because a product must launch as soon as possible, there’s not enough money at the start, the user base must grow at the fastest rate possible, or the product idea changes constantly in trying to discover an effective business model. Why is this?

Product-growth and market-penetration rates are critical in a company’s early days. In fact, they’re more important than perfect technical solutions or high-quality designs. This is true especially for lean startups that employ the minimum viable product (MVP) concept. A team first needs to validate that they're solving the right problem for the right audience, in the right market. Only after that should they polish their product. At that point, a company understands that good design is important to the product’s success. Read More

Dogmatic UX professionals would likely cringe at this: We must sometimes set aside our prized UX processes and deliverables to do what’s necessary for our companies to stay profitable during difficult times, which many of us are experiencing in 2024. Often, what’s necessary could be contributing to processes and deliverables that feel unrelated to our professions. However, many of these other activities can serve as perfect use cases for UX professionals’ skills because we are uniquely qualified and positioned to influence various business strategies. Moreover, this is not a zero-sum situation. As we mold our skills to fit other valuable areas of expertise, we can shoehorn in our valued UX best practices and methodologies. What are some other activities that could benefit from our UX skillsets? In this column, I’ll present and expand upon the following activities:

• leading Customer Advisory Board discussions
• volunteering to conduct market research and competitive analysis
• facilitating workshops focusing on features and requirements
• driving innovation activities
• supporting internal, product-telemetry strategy and analysis Read More

Methods for measuring the various aspects of a Web site’s information architecture are hard to find. In this month’s column, I’ll demonstrate how we can use the six tiers within the information architecture (IA) vertical of the DSIA Research Initiative’s UX Design Practice Verticals, shown in Figure 1, to create an IA maturity assessment tool. The benefit of this method is that it helps to quantify IA solutions in a more tangible and actionable manner. Read More