The 8 stages of Corporate Usability Maturity

“To truly become a user-centered organization, companies almost always progress through the same sequence of steps, gradually increasing their levels of commitment to usability.”

Jakob Nielsen, UseIt

In short, these are the 8 stages of Corporate Usability Maturity*:

Stage 1: Hostility toward usability

The only goal is to build features and make them work on the computer. In this mindset, humans are irrelevant — they’re told to use the system, regardless of whether doing so is easy or pleasant.

Stage 2: Developer-centered usability

The company realizes the value of making designs easier to use. The design team relies on its own intuition of what is usable.

Stage 3: Skunkworks usability

A few groups within the company will initiate small ad hoc usability efforts, like hiring an expert or recruit some users. There are no budgets, all initiatives are driven by individual user advocates.

Stage 4: Dedicated usability budget

However small, there is a budget for usability. The company mainly views usability as a magic potion that’s sprinkled sparsely over a user interface to shine it up. The main usability method is user testing, which is invariably conducted late in the development process after the user interface has been at least partially implemented.

Stage 5: Managed usability

There is an official usability group. Usability studies and tests are conducted more consistently. The company has a person - the usability manager - whose job it is to think about usability across the organization and across design projects.

Stage 6: Systematic usability process

The company has recognized the need for an actual user-centered design process, with multiple activities and milestones. On important projects, the team conducts early user research before they do any design. Iterative design is more common at this stage because the company realizes that it can’t achieve the best interface quality in one round of usability fixes.

Stage 7: Integrated user-centered design

The company often tracks quality through quantitative usability metrics. Each project has defined usability goals that these measurements must surpass for the design to be greenlighted for release. Each step is infused with user data.

Stage 8: User-driven corporation

Usability affects corporate strategy and activities beyond interface design.

* The summary contains literal extracts from the articles.

According to Nielsen, it may take up to twenty years for a company to proceed from stage 1 to stage 8. He advises not to leap over several stages, but to advance step by step.

Read the original articles on Nielsen’s Alertbox: part 1 (stage 1-4) and part 2 (stage 5-8).

Tags: gebruiksonderzoek, projectaanpak, ROI

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 2nd, 2006 at 4:06 pm and is filed under Usability. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.