Business: UX Maturity

This edition of Ask UXmatters discusses how to communicate and sell the UX message across all levels of an organization. Our experts share what strategies and tactics for evangelizing UX have worked for them.

Ask UXmatters is here to answer your questions about user experience matters. If you want to read our experts’ responses to your questions in an upcoming edition of Ask UXmatters, please send your questions to: [email protected].

Q: Executive buy-in is important, but communicating and selling the UX message across the organization, at all levels, is just as important. I would be most interested in learning more about the corporate cultures that embrace UX or customer-centered thinking and understanding more about why they have and what makes them ripe. What worked in the organizations you’ve worked for? What caused frustrations? It seems when everyone is trying to improve the user experience, it can help empower a usability / UX / design team to work on more strategic initiatives instead of facing roadblocks along the way.—from a UXmatters reader.

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UX regression—that is, a step back in the quality or usability of an application or Web site’s user experience—can occur whenever a design diverts from an existing workflow because of a technology or design change. Some refer to this phenomenon as UX backlash. As designers and developers, we subject users to UX regression to some extent every time we embark on making a design change.

Historical Context

User Experience is a moving target. Just ask Google. Design experiments around their Search toolbar over the years have demonstrated both forward progress and regressive patterns in their search experience.

For example, in 2007, Google introduced universal search, integrating search results from a variety of sources such as Web, images, video, news, and maps. A tabbed navigation bar in the upper-left corner of the Google home page and search results pages allowed users to search for, then view results for each of these types of content. This navigation bar remained part of the user interface for about two and a half years. Read More