This score signifies that design as a process doesn’t exist at your company yet. No user research is being conducted either to understand your users’ evolving pain points and unmet needs or to evaluate the quality of designs through your users’ eyes prior to development.
Here’s a breakdown of what’s lacking right now:
1. User experience is not a priority:
The quality of the user experience of your website, product, or app is poor and a large amount of rework post-development is required. New features are deemed more important than addressing existing design issues and as nothing in your process improves, the user experience inevitably declines in quality over time.
2. Opinions are trumping analysis:
You may or may not have design resources available on your team, but if you do, they are designing based on internal direction which comes from personal opinion and best guesses rather than user research.
3. Solutions aren’t tested:
Testing is not part of your team’s culture. The rush to deliver new features outweighs the need to validate new designs with users. Your team delivers what amounts to an untested prototype while hoping your users will be delighted.
4. Teams lack clear direction:
The details of new features may not be very well documented for your development team such that they are having to make design decisions for themselves.
5: You’re not measuring results:
You have no way of measuring the quality of the user experience and no way to demonstrate progress or the need for investment in design to your leadership team.
What’s needed?
First, obtain a clear understanding of the UX quality of your product—not with opinion, but with data. Without this baseline data, it will be very difficult to prove improvements in design over time. Next, gaining a better understanding of your users’ unmet needs through user research will enable you to design more effective and useful features. Lastly, rapidly prototyping and testing new designs will allow you to iterate and improve upon them before you invest time in development.
