Wednesday 11 March 2015

Maturing UX in our organisations - seminar write up

I attended yet another excellent free breakfast briefing put on by Edinburgh consultants, User Vision. This time the topic was the UX maturity of organisations.

Many companies have embraced a user centred or customer first approach to how they do business, to some degree at least. But almost all, it has to be said still have a long way to go.

User Vision Breakfast Briefing
Image credit User Vision (http://bit.ly/1DhtO1r) 

The session included some interesting models which I will be keeping in mind for future presentations of my own.


Presenter Stephen Denning talked about how businesses should be thinking about their customer/user first:

  1. Experiences
  2. Interactions
  3. Touch points
  4. Procedures
  5. Systems


But how often is it the other way round? A system is procured that sets out procedures for predefined touch points. With these established, there's a limit to how much UX professionals can enhance user interactions and experiences.

We reflected on the simple 3 circle Venn diagram of:

  • Business
  • Technology
  • User

Something like this:
Image credit: GordonChoi.com




Where do our organisations give emphasis? Everyone in the room - higher ed, government and finance mainly - agreed that it was tech that was the primary driver and the typically the user came last. A simple indicator of how user focused our organisations are, even with established UX teams in some instances.

The session then went on to look in detail at a 4 quadrant UX maturity model developed by Tomer Sharon 2012. Hearing about this prompted me to dig a bit deeper, and I turned up this great article which is well worth a read:

Dealing with Difficult People, Teams, and Organizations: A UX Research Maturity Model - article by Tomer Sharon for uxmatters.com


So, all in all a really useful and interesting session, with a group of professionals across a range of sectors all encountering the same challenges. And of course, breakfast!

Thanks as ever to User Vision for a great breakfast briefing, and to presenter Stephen Denning.

UX Maturity breakfast briefing overview - User Vision website






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