Is Your Organization Experienced?
by petermeA few days ago, while reading Bruce Temkin’s excellent Customer Experience Matters blog, I came across a post announcing a new Forrester report called “The Customer Experience Journey.” In the post, Bruce included the following diagram illustrating an organization’s maturity in delivering great experiences:

I was immediately struck by a flashback. Four years ago, my colleagues Janice Fraser and Scott Hirsch conducted research on the ties between business value and user experience, and one of their outcomes was what they called the ROI Process Model, which was depicted as such:

5 stages, shown in stair-step! And the parallels between the two are striking.
So, I realized that, 4 years later, we should simply give that research away. The report we published, “Leveraging Business Value: How ROI Changes User Experience” originally cost $395, but I’m happy to announce that you can now download it for free (412K PDF). You’ll find the ROI Process Model on page 28, with lengthy descriptions of each stage following it.
Other diagrams include the User Experience Value Chain:

And the first time we ever shared what we internally refer to as The Linking Elephants, which ties together user behavior and financial outcomes:

While the report is 4 years old, our experience is that the findings are relevant still today, and we use the models in this report often in our client work. It’s satisfying that Forrester’s report seems to validate Janice and Scott’s research, and we’re happy to share it with you free of charge.


September 23rd, 2008 at 8:43 am
Thanks for sharing, Peter.
September 24th, 2008 at 4:31 am
Forrester won’t be the first to provide a scale to measure organization’s UX or UCD maturity…
2 interested articles / studies to assess Usability maturity (very closed from the UX perspective):
- Obviously Nielsen with his corporate usability maturity scale (2006), simple but useful(http://www.useit.com/alertbox/maturity.html)
- a second study from J Earthy “Usability Maturity Model: Processes” (1998) based on ISO 18529 (Human centered Design evaluation) and ISO 15504. Really interesting.
6 levels:
Level X Unrecognised (no indicators);
Level A Recognised (A1 Problem recognition attribute, A2 Performed processes attribute)
Level B Considered (B.1 Quality in use awareness attribute, B.2 User focus attribute)
Level C Implemented (C.1 User involvement attribute, C.2 Human factors technology attribute, C.3 Human factors skills attribute)
Level D Integrated (D.1 Integration attribute, D.2 Improvement attribute, D.3 Iteration attribute)
Level E Institutionalised (E.1 Human-centred leadership attribute, E.2 Organisational human-centredness attribute)
September 25th, 2008 at 7:41 am
I got to your blog via a David Armano’s link on Facebook: quite a journey.
Thanks very much for sharing and for the brilliant thoughts.