UX maturity model for enterprise

In addition to measuring performance for specific business goals, there are also frameworks for measuring the organization's UX maturity. In a pair of articles in 2006, Jakob Nielsen describes eight stages of UX maturity:

1. Hostility towards UX. In the first stage, organizations may be hostile to the user's experience and instead prioritizes feature-building.
2. Developer-centered UX. Then comes developer-centered UX, where teams rely on their intuition to build features that may primarily appeal to niche audiences.
3. "Skunkworks" UX. Skunkworks means that the organization begins to invest more in UX after realizing that it cannot rely on just the team's experience; a small and informal group of people lead the efforts. There is no formal recognition of UX as a discipline yet.
4. UX budget. The organization procures a direct UX budget, and the organization starts formally planning UX initiatives.
5. Managed usability. A UX-focused manager who thinks about UX across the organization and focuses on design leads an official UX group. Research is still limited primarily to user testing, and UX is still mostly used as a "nice-to-have" addition to normal development.
6. Systematic user-centered design process. Iterative design becomes a greater part of the company's culture. The company has a formal system for tracking UX quality. UX research informs development before design projects begin, and senior leadership understands that a user-driven design process is necessary.
7. Integrated user-centered design. User research very early in the process becomes much more ingrained. The company tracks UX quality systematically, each project has usability goals and milestones, and UX data helps to determine future initiatives. User data informs each phase of software development.
8. User-driven corporation. Nielsen calls this "UX nirvana" — it takes UX beyond the realm of design and into company philosophy. User-driven corporations use user research to determine what the company's position should be overall. User experience extends to all areas of the company (including customer service design, marketing, and every interaction a user has with the company).

Nielsen notes that for most companies, this type of transformation does not happen quickly. It can take years, or, in the case of large enterprises, decades to go from the beginning to a fully mature user-driven corporation. It is not possible to skip a stage. Companies can go through some stages faster, but they must complete the steps to achieve "UX nirvana," a true user-driven corporation.