Increasing UX maturity by building a user-centered design team

As the first UX designer at NetApp StorageGRID, I had to cultivate a human-centered design culture in a team with stakeholders developing the product for the past 15 years without users at the forefront. This article shares details of the UX strategy that enabled me to scale from a solo designer to a high-functioning mature design team.

Identifying the current UX maturity

  • Inspired by the Neilson Norman UX-maturity model, I started to identify the current UX maturity of the team.
  • After speaking to my peers in the team, I realized that there had been a smaller effort in the past to make the product more user-centric by consulting a design firm. However, the technical complexity of the product turned this effort futile. Thus I had lessons to learn from the failure of the design firm.
  • Furthermore, as most of the engineers and stakeholders explored solutions without the end users in mind, I had to start publicizing a human-centered design approach. To accomplish this, I identified UX champions who shared some desire to simplify the product.
  • These attributes deemed the team’s UX maturity as Stage 2: Limited.

nngroup’s stages of UX maturity

With the current maturity in mind, I drafted a plan to increase the team’s UX maturity and build a high-functioning UX team.

Stage 3 - An emerging UX culture in the team

Until 6 months from inception

  • To ensure a 100+ team identifies the UX team (in this case me) as a stakeholder in the product lifecycle, I socialized UX work across multiple scrum teams in different avenues like town halls, retrospectives, etc. I performed a heuristic analysis of our product and analyzed our competitors to identify the TOP 3 THEMES that we have to work on to simplify the product.
  • Frequent conversations with the product management team helped me convince PMs that UX should not be considered as a cherry on the cake by expecting me to just beautify an existing flow.
  • Joined hands with an engineering manager to drive a product simplicity initiative. This UX champion helped spread the word across C-suite associates.
  • These initiatives helped me be a part of the early stages of some projects, however, I was still not included in some projects because they were deemed as “back-end” according to stakeholders.

Presenting the top 3 UX gaps in the product at town halls to educate stakeholders

Simplicity initiative approach in collaboration with the engineering manager to identify all the gaps in the product-user lifecycle

Stage 4 - Establishing standards, routines to form structured methods

Until 1 year 2 months from inception

  • Since many teams were educated about UX research & design, and also because the product managers were in-line, I had an opportunity to grow the team because of the increasing number of projects.
  • With an increase in the headcount, we had to standardize our approaches, tools, and methods so that our deliverables are the same. This was supplemented with a holistic UX onboarding process that helped new associates ramp up quickly.
  • Focused on discovery research to form personas that could act as cornerstones in our decisions.
  • We were able to continuously perform qualitative validation research to help us gather pain points that could be fed into the product roadmap. This helped us shift left compared to the development process enabling us to both be a part of architectural discussions and deliver our deliverables on time.
  • All the deliverables from the team were shown in demo meetings with the whole engineering team. This helped us gather stakeholder feedback and also educate others on new projects that we were working on.
  • These initiatives helped us be a part of all projects in a release.

Timeline of UX activities and deliverables in a release 

Stage 5 - Integrating design within the product lifecycle

Until 2 year 7 months from inception

  • Other stakeholders like developers, technical writers, product managers, and QA associates are eager to join UX research sessions.
  • Qualitative behavioral metrics and quantitative attitudinal metrics are created to track the current state of UX compared to a baseline. These metrics are monitored in every release and any bugs are resolved as a part of the next release.
  • A UX checklist is created. This checklist has to be completed before shipping a release.
  • The UX team is invited to present when any new stakeholder (QA, Dev, PM, Writers) joins the organization because these stakeholders would surely need to interact with the UX team in the release lifecycle.
  • The UX team is not only sharing its practices with the rest of NetApp (all other products) but also with the local design community through meetups and conferences.

Stage 6 - Users drive the product strategy

In-progress

  • UX is included as an attribute that defines the company’s success. New frameworks like semesters planning are introduced at the CEO staff level to break the vision down into smaller achievable targets for all the company’s products. At a high level, UX KPIs must correlate with business values and this should be monitored frequently.
  • Executives are being trained so that user research is the driving force behind every decision at every level. Until now, all the stakeholders were aware of UX and are now being trained to contribute to the product’s experience.
  • Furthermore, UX must be a part of the employees’ remuneration program by identifying and incentivizing stakeholders who contribute to the product’s experience.  
  • Scrum teams within products are evolving to embrace user-driven iterative design and the rituals that come as a part of it. For example user research, design workshops, usability testing, etc.

Featured Photo by Clay Banks on Unsplash