There are a whole lot of articles with a whole lot of questionnaires all promising to put a number on whatever business processes we deem important. A questionnaire like this is a great first step for gauging where your business is, how it stacks up against others, and where you might like to go next.

I put together this formula for tracking UX process maturity after sending the NN Group UX maturity survey to my boss and a few others in leadership at my company. I was the UX manager, and wanted to gauge how people were thinking about UX, and see if we were on the same page with our understanding of what UX was doing vs what we could be doing. The maturity survey was a good first step. 

But it was just the first step. After gauging our overall UX maturity, we needed to figure out what the next step on UX maturity looked like for us, and what actions we needed to take to get there. And once we did that, we needed to understand if those actions were getting the outcomes we expected.

Enter, UX process maturity tracking.

What is UX process maturity?

Simply put, UX process maturity is how consistently your team is completing all the activities in your UX process for each project you work on. Low maturity means your process is not followed that consistently, and high maturity means that the process is used in the same way on every project.

It’s easy for people to overestimate how mature a UX practice is, and it’s also often difficult to really know what a mature practice even looks like or why you would want one. To understand your overall maturity, ask your UX team to fill out the NN Group UX maturity questionnaire, and share their results. Send this questionnaire to others on teams you frequently work with and get their results too. Averaging these answers together should give you a good sense of where your UX stands.

Monitoring process maturity is going to be most helpful if your team is at stage 2-4 on the NN Group UX maturity scale. These are the stages where defining a UX process and focusing on its repeatability is going to give you the most impact, since at these stages UX is still finding its footing at the company. These are also the stages where most UX teams find themselves.

When I started tracking process maturity with my team, we wanted to get from a solid 3, maybe almost a 4, on the NN Group UX maturity scale, to a solid 4. I tracked the UX process across individual projects to quantify if we were hitting that ‘repeatable’ element of maturity.

Why track your process maturity?

Tracking this process maturity was popular with my team, as it gave them a clear metric to shoot for. And honestly, it makes doing UX activities feel more official – after all, there’s a number attached to them.

For my team, having a well-defined process monitored by this metric was a motivator. We were able to see that we were making progress – something that is often hard to get a sense of if UX maturity efforts span years. The team was able to see that year over year, we were getting better at following our process, and identify where we wanted to focus on improving. 

Process maturity is also a fast way of showing that the discipline of UX is improving at your organization. While having real product outcomes is the best way to prove UX value, being able to quickly show that you are continuously improving the ways you get those outcomes is also useful.

And consistent UX process breeds overall UX maturity. If you follow a process that produces results, people will see how UX can be valuable and you will have the data to go out and show people the impact UX is having.

It is important to note that UX process maturity is not identical to overall UX maturity as a whole. While UX maturity looks at the overall impact UX is having on an organization and how efficiently that impact can be made, UX process maturity tracks how well you are doing the steps in your UX process. Process maturity is one part of UX maturity and can be a good indicator of if it’s time to start working on larger UX initiatives or if repeatability and process is the place to focus.

How to track UX process maturity

Let’s break down how to set up your process maturity tracking, step by step.

Define the Ideal UX Process Steps

Figure out where you want to go. I did this by created a list of all the steps that make up our ideal UX process—everything from user research to testing and iteration.

Audit your Existing UX Process

Take a look at the tasks you do today, regardless of how frequently they happen, and document them.

Define your Maturing UX Process

Look at the deltas between your ideal process and your existing process, and decide where to focus. Don’t try to make the leap from existing to ideal all at once. Instead, choose a few key areas to focus on improving that will move you closer to your ideal process.

Track Each Project

I built a spreadsheet that tracked each project across these steps, marking whether each step was:

• Done (D)
• Not Done (N)
• Kinda Done (K)
• Unneeded (U)
• Abandoned (A)

As each project progressed, I marked down the steps that were completed. At the end of the project, I marked down any steps that weren’t complete as either Not Done or Unneeded. 

Sort of Done exists because sometimes you give it your best shot, but it just doesn’t quite work out. It’s important to account for this and not trap yourself in an artificial binary of done/not done.

Abandoned exists to track if a project is canceled and when. If a project is shelved, any incomplete steps get marked as abandoned. I then track how many projects got abandoned, as well as how many steps in each project remained incomplete at the time of abandonment.

Quantify Process Maturity

For each project, I used a formula to calculate a maturity percentage:

• Formula: (C + (K/0.5) + U) / Total Steps

This gives full credit for completed and unneeded steps, half credit for “sort of done,” and no credit for incomplete steps.

Each project’s maturity is expressed as a decimal between 0 and 1, representing 0% and 100% maturity.

In the spreadsheet, I track the project’s total maturity, whether or not it was abandoned, whether or not it is completed, if deadlines were missed, if there were issues with project direction, and if research and reporting was done after the project launched. The last three items are specifically things I wanted to keep an eye on at my organization. You can switch these up for things you are interested in tracking if needed.

Analyze Results

Without a baseline, metrics are largely useless. They don’t mean anything if you don’t know if, say, 40% is higher or lower than usual.

I took all the projects we did in the previous year and filled out the maturity spreadsheet for them to get a baseline of what our process maturity was like.

Then, when I started putting in the current year’s projects, I was able to see if the project process was ranking better or worse than previously.

There’s a couple of interesting metrics to look at. 

Overall maturity percentage 

Higher is better. High maturity means your UX process is repeatable and in use by everyone on the team.

Gap between the most mature and least mature projects

You want the gap to be small, meaning you are consistently using the process for most projects. 

Number of abandoned projects

This isn’t good or bad on its own. Maybe you try a lot of things, prove out their usefulness or not using UX research, and shelve the ones that don’t make sense to keep working on. The key thing is how far down the pipeline the projects got before getting abandoned. Ideally, you’re shelving projects pretty quickly if they aren’t panning out, not spending a lot of UX resources only to not follow through on building the project. 

Which steps are being skipped most often in the process

This can help you decide if they are unneeded or if something is getting in the way of them happening.

A word of warning: Don’t use this maturity tracker to figure out who’s doing a bad job or judge anyone’s work product. This is a great way to tank morale, and it’s unfair. If you notice that all the projects one person is working on have low process maturity, it’s probably not all that person’s fault. There are probably other forces at work that are making it difficult to do all the process steps. You need to jump in and uncover what the problems really are, not just blame the lack of maturity on someone and move on.

In Conclusion

UX process maturity tracking provides a clear, actionable framework for teams to measure how consistently they follow their UX processes and identify areas for improvement. This can motivate teams by showing their progress over time and strengthen the organization’s overall UX maturity by demonstrating the value of a structured and reliable process.

I hope this article has been valuable! Try out UX process maturity tracking in your organization and see what you uncover!

Key Takeaways:

• Data-Driven Insights: Tracking maturity gives you a standard, quantifiable way of seeing where your process maturity is
• Team Empowerment: Showing progress project by project and year over year helps motivate teams to keep doing better and better work
• Long-Term Vision: Demonstrating process maturity can help lay the groundwork for greater UX buy-in and maturity across the organization.