How User Researchers Conduct Research in Organizations with Low UX Maturity

This article will delve into the challenges faced by companies with “low UX maturity” and how to address these challenges at the organizational, product team, and researcher levels to improve UX maturity.

1. What is a company with “low UX maturity”?

In 2006, Jakob Nielsen created the earliest UX maturity model, called Enterprise UX Maturity. Since then, Nielsen Norman Company (NN/g) has updated this model and named the six key stages of UX from 0 to best practice .

Generally speaking, different companies can measure their performance according to these stages. We can think of low-maturity organizations as being at one of the first three stages, between Absence and Emerging.

Nielsen Norman’s UX Maturity Model covers the entire UX design process, but in this article, I’m specifically talking about UX research.

If your company has hired user researchers, then at least the company has a certain degree of recognition of user research. Considering the huge workload, we can classify this type of company as at least "emerging".

Nielsen Norman says the Embryonic maturity stage is when “the company’s UX exists, but the efforts are inconsistent and inefficient.”

A key part of assessing UX maturity and development is understanding four key factors: strategy, culture, process, and outcomes. All of these factors need to be addressed if you want to drive UX maturity.

The UX culture of a company, that is, its knowledge and attitude towards user experience, determines how the company reacts to the work you do. It is also usually the hardest to change and is the one you encounter most often in your day-to-day work.

Let’s take a look at some of the scenarios a UXR leader might encounter in an emerging company, specifically related to knowledge and attitudes toward research. We can look at these scenarios from different perspectives: the organizational level, the product team level, and the individual researcher level.

2. Attitudes and Challenges at Different Levels

1. Organizational level: Distrust of the value of UXR

You might hear: “I don’t need a researcher like [other product teams], we’re already experts in how customers use our features.”

Research leadership challenges: Find ways to emphasize how research can provide insights across user groups, not just a single product. Use your insights to complement product managers’ decisions, rather than forcefully overturn or compete with product managers’ insights.

2. Product team level: Use UXR to validate or fine-tune product ideas

You might hear: “We need to do some research to prove my idea is correct.”

Research leadership challenge: Use evaluative UX research projects to highlight gaps or biases in knowledge, and emphasize how insights from user research can inform overall strategy and prioritization.

3. Researcher level: I don’t know how to improve the company’s UX maturity

You might hear: “We’re just following the product roadmap our PM tells us to follow.”

Research leadership challenges: Discuss your perspective on research with researchers, inspire them to explore research potential, clarify your expectations, and build a research community with other forward-thinking UX researchers.

How to deal with these challenges

1. How to improve user experience maturity at the company level

Researchers often find mixed reactions to their work at the company level. One product team may embrace research insights, while another may brush them off. Researchers struggle because product and company leadership don’t buy into research enough to guide or encourage full implementation of product research practices.

One way to address this is to communicate that research yields the best insights when it focuses on groups of users, rather than focusing entirely on individual products or product teams. And these insights are often relevant to multiple product teams (or even the entire company).

This means that researchers need to revisit individual research projects and highlight insights that are relevant to user groups rather than just specific products. By sharing insights in this way, you can complement product managers’ existing understanding of their customers and show them how your work adds to their existing information, while creating a shared understanding among product teams.

2. Improve the maturity of user experience at the product team level

Let’s say you work closely with a specific product team and the product manager believes that research is the best way to validate a newly launched feature. To them, research provides insights into how users or customers react to a feature, and this insight can help them decide whether and how to iterate on that feature.

This is indeed a service that user researchers provide in their extensive toolbox. However, if they only view research as a contribution to development and design validation, your partners are missing out on a lot of critical information. Sometimes, user insights shine brightest and have the most lasting impact when used for vision or strategy creation and prioritization.

Are you stuck in a cycle of conducting usability tests and feeling discouraged, thinking you’ll never get to the point of a strategic research project? People may not realize that usability testing can also reveal insights into customer needs and behaviors. Keep track of these additional insights and find a good time to share these findings to contribute to a greater purpose.

Your partners may not even know it, but your initiative could improve your job, as well as theirs. Then, use that momentum to encourage research to move earlier in the product development process.

3. Improve user experience maturity at the researcher level

Low UX maturity can be a problem at the organizational or product team level, but it can also be a problem within your UX research team. Some researchers may simply be accustomed to working in low-maturity organizations and are unwilling or unaware of how to push their work forward .

This is arguably the most challenging aspect of improving UX maturity, as it originates from within your own team. This is a legacy of wider management challenges. Teams need active leadership to show them the possibilities of user research.

When developing your vision, you need to engage with your existing team and make sure everyone is on board with your goals. You need to listen to your researchers and their needs with key collaborators, advise them, and step in when necessary to challenge their assumptions about their research.

Finally, whether you are dealing with a change in culture at the organizational, product, or researcher level, have a seat at the decision-making table. Changing organizational culture is a challenge, and UXR leaders need to ensure that team leadership sees and internalizes the contributions of research . This is the fastest way to increase organizational maturity.

Originally published on Dovetail, this article was written by Janelle Ward, Principal Consultant at Janelle Ward Insights. Janelle has led UX research at digital product companies, both as a founding leader and as a manager training and scaling existing research teams. Janelle has a background in psychology and digital communications, and worked as an assistant professor for ten years before moving into UX research.

Author: Janelle Ward; Translator: Huang Suchen

Source: WeChat public account: Peron User Research (ID: LongRuiGuanTong)