This article describes stage 6 in the six-stage NN/g UX-maturity model. Get an idea of your organization’s UX maturity by taking a short quiz (10 minutes or less).

In stage-6 organizations, everyone is fully enlightened about the value of user-centered design. User research and user-centered design are the driving force behind everything these organizations do, from the highest level of organizational strategy down to the tiniest design element within a design system. Development operations embrace user-driven iterative design. Both individuals and teams plan for change and innovation, and user research drives new investments by delivering upon unmet needs in the market.

While this stage represents the ultimate maturity goal, it is difficult to achieve and challenging to maintain for long.

Stage 6 summary visual

stage 6 summary visual

UX maturity is composed of four factors: strategy, culture, process, and outcomes. The following sections describe how these four factors typically look in a stage-6 organization.

In This Article:

Strategy at Stage 6

Organizations at stage 6 have top-level leadership and decision makers who have adopted a UX focus. For this reason, the organizations’ strategic visions revolve around user needs and directly state the intent to deliver user-centered experiences over the long term. These organizations have defined a method to prioritize work that is deeply rooted in the users’ need and is systematically applied across the entire organization. Discovery and other exploratory research phases are nonnegotiable and are designed to take place well before any project is approved.

Stage-6 organizations have a well-vetted and respected design system that is owned and managed by a specialized design-system team, which continually iterates and improves it over time. Design, research, and development operations also have specialized support resources. These resources ensure operations are comprehensive, formalized, and subject to continuous learning and improvement.

Budget is well-planned and always adequate for current projects. Portions of the budget are consistently put toward additional UX growth and sustained maturity. High-level management roles such as, UX VPs, design or research directors exist. In some stage-6 organizations there may even be additional budget and resources dedicated to evangelizing UX outside of the company by developing resources and content to further support the wider UX community.

Culture at Stage 6

At stage-6 organizations, UX is understood and championed by the highest levels of organization leadership. For this reason, UX is an equal business-operations partner to more-traditional domains such as marketing, product, or engineering. The organization not only accepts UX output, but expects and relies on it. There is a strong understanding that UX practices should be operationalized throughout the organization in order to create an environment that can deliver high-quality experiences at scale.

Stage 6 organizations have supporting structures such as employee-training initiatives, mentorship programs, hiring practices, and employee-development paths; all are meant to deliver upon the strategic vision. Employees at stage-6 organizations share a common goal to continually iterate on UX processes based on repetition and ongoing learning.

Process at Stage 6

The UX process at stage 6 is established, yet malleable. It’s fully operationalized, acting as a principal component of the project-planning and -development process. However, ongoing iteration and adaptation of the process is encouraged based on varying goals and contexts. UX is applied throughout the organization by all teams and departments. Even business areas that don’t traditionally apply UX (e.g., strategy, supply chain, or customer support) are driven by early user research and discovery. Employees understand that a variety of design and research methods will be utilized, and everyone is expected to participate. The organization is prolific at developing novel UX methods for tackling new business challenges. These UX methods may even become industry standards.

Crossfunctional collaboration is purposefully embedded in the organization’s processes, allowing teams to share insights and learn from each other.

Design systems and other guiding frameworks have been developed in order to efficiently and systematically generate high-quality, consistent output.

Outcomes at Stage 6

Most or all designs produced are of high quality, resulting in industry-leading design solutions, while applied research and design practices become standards adopted by the greater design community.

Organizational leaders track success metrics that are aligned with the user-centered strategic vision and illustrative of the quality of the overall customer experience. Because UX influences the KPIs tracked by the organization, as well as the overall business value, these success metrics not only capture the effectiveness of UX practices, but are also used to measure the overall success of the company. Strategic decision making is founded in these metrics, which are not to be eclipsed by other competing metrics. All leaders and teams monitor them regularly and update them as appropriate.

Variations Within Stage 6

Companies at stage 6 have found UX maturity; however, even at this stage, there are slight differences in how that maturity was established and how strongly it has taken hold within the organization.

Example 1: A newly established company

Companies that were recently founded and developed have a leg up when it comes to reaching UX maturity. These companies had the luxury of coming into existence with present-day knowledge of how to operationalize UX within the organization in order to develop products and services that meet modern customer needs. For this reason, new companies had few hurdles to overcome (other than having sufficient funding in the startup phase).

They didn’t have to shift away from traditional ways of working, but they could organically develop a customer-focused culture by prioritizing UX as they built and scaled their business. Since UX was defining characteristic in the development of these organizations, it’s a strong part of their brands’ DNA. However, hypergrowth can risk diluting a strong UX-centric company culture, as outsiders are hired from less-mature organizations.

Example 2: A small established organization with forward-thinking leadership

If an organization has been around for more than 10 years, chances are that UX was not a significant factor in early investments and strategic decision making. These companies established more-traditional business operations for a time when customers were less immersed in their product or service experiences than they are today.

Small companies have few employees, hierarchy, and red tape to cut through to make strategic changes. Those with enlightened and customer-driven leadership can be fairly nimble in building UX into their day-to-day operations. Small companies that have put the customer at the center of their vision and strategy were able to quickly mature to stage 6. In small companies that have shifted strategy to adopt UX practices, there’s risk that this transformation may not hold. The inherent challenges in adopting change or residual uncertainty about UX could cause the company to regress to lower stages.

Example 3: A company committed to design innovation and thought leadership

Other companies of any size and age may also have been motivated to transform their operations and advance to stage 6. Such companies have leadership that is committed to user-centered design, as well as significant resources to invest in making mature UX operations a reality. Often, these leaders are driven by the desire to make their mark in the design world by delivering best-in-class design innovation. They demonstrate success and lead the way for other business to adopt better design practices. To do so, these organization invest resources in UX thought-leadership content through blogging or speaking at design conferences.

Advantages and Disadvantages of Being at Stage 6

The advantage of being at stage 6 is that you’ve achieved the end goal. UX is at the center of organizational strategy, the right supporting processes are in place, and employees embrace them. The UX engine is humming, resulting in consistent high-quality output.

The disadvantage is that it doesn’t take much to go off the rails. A leader with conflicting priorities, staffing challenges, or a deteriorating culture of UX could quickly throw a wrench in the UX engine, causing the organization to quickly regress to lower stages of maturity.

How to Maintain Stage 6

At the lower stages of UX maturity, it’s a reasonable goal to progress to the next level, and this aspirational goal can be motivating. In contrast, when you’re at the top, the goal is simply to remain there. Of course, everything can always get better, but the new goal of remaining on top can paradoxically be harder than the earlier goals of advancing.

In order to maintain stage 6, you must focus on continuing to nurture a user-focused culture. Organizational culture is built by establishing and maintaining shared values among employees. If employees begin making decisions that are not in line with user-centered design and decision making, the culture of UX can deteriorate, bringing the other factors (strategy, process, and outcomes) down with it.

There are several ways to ensure that employees remain engaged and continue to value UX:

  • Avoid careless and indifferent messaging around the organization’s values. Leaders and managers should continue to embed UX-related values in discussions about the company’s goals for the future.
  • Continue to evaluate and hold leaders accountable for how their teams demonstrate these shared values. Managers should be tasked with upholding UX-related values among their teams –- for example, by taking UX values into account to decide employee review and remuneration. Managers should share ideas and tactics used to champion these values among those they lead.
  • Establish programs to celebrate and socialize successes and individual employees who deliver on UX values. Something can be valued by people only if it’s valued and incentivized by the organization as a whole. Create channels for employees to nominate each other for demonstrating UX values and celebrate these successes across the organization.

The key at this stage is to maintain the UX culture that drives the behaviors and decisions of employees in their day-to-day work. Conduct surveys to determine the baseline culture and run these surveys periodically to track progress and monitor change.

Finally, if you do regress to stage 5, don’t despair or view this setback as a total failure. It is natural for organizations to change priorities or to adapt to changing market conditions in ways that may be suboptimal. After some time at stage 5, remind people how good it was to be on the top and motivate them to make a renewed effort to rectify the problem that caused the regression.

Additional Resources for Stage 6 Organizations

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