Don’t Fall Behind in Design Maturity

…Design-mature companies achieve cost savings, profit growth, and enhanced brand and market positions as results of their design efforts.

InVision summarizes this point in their annual Design Maturity Report, which they have compiled since 2019 based on the design maturity of over 2,200 companies globally.

What is Design Maturity?

Design maturity measures how comprehensively a company integrates design into its processes, culture, planning, and strategy. InVision identifies five levels of design maturity, ranging from “Producers” at the lowest level to “Visionaries” at the highest. These maturity levels include:

1. Producers
2. Connectors
3. Architects
4. Scientists
5. Visionaries

At Level 1, Producers, the benefits of design are limited to product usability, with design primarily focused on UI and possibly some UX work. At Level 5, Visionaries, design is utilized across all organizational functions—from long-term vision work to grassroots operational tasks. At this highest level, design generates an extensive list of benefits for the company:

1. Usability
2. Customer satisfaction
3. Profitability
4. Product-specific metrics
5. Conversion metrics
6. Cost savings
7. Time to market
8. Access to new markets
9. Employee productivity
10. Brand equity

In summary, not leveraging design or design thinking means giving competitors an unnecessary edge in customer perception, business metrics, and market position.

How Do You Know if Your Organization is Design-Mature?

Design maturity can and should be measured quantitatively. This can be done through internal surveys, which provide data to track progress and inform decisions. A simpler approach is to ask yourself and your colleagues questions like:

• Do we discuss the importance of design and customer experience?
• Is design visible in our company?
• Do we understand what customer-centricity is, and do we leverage it?
• Does design and customer experience drive decision-making in our organization?
• Is design and customer-centricity a guiding principle in our business?
• Do we enable everyone to benefit from the work of designers through integrated tools?
• Does everyone in our organization know what design is and what it can achieve?
• Do we know how much we invest in design and customer-centricity, what we gain from it, and what opportunities different budgeting could unlock?
• Are there teams where design is more integrated than in others? If so, why is design localized instead of being organization-wide?

Often, improving design maturity starts with the design team. In many technology companies, the ratio of designers to developers is typically between 1:10 and 1:20. However, in recent years, many large companies have shifted toward much higher ratios—up to 1:4. This shift is explained by factors outlined in models such as InVision’s Design Maturity Framework and Nielsen Norman Group’s UX Maturity Model.

Forrester published a report in 2016 stating that “every dollar invested in UX design yields a 100x return.” Globally, the trend of narrowing the designer-to-developer ratio has been gaining traction for years. For example, IBM reduced its ratio from 1:72 to 1:8 between 2012 and 2017, and Dropbox shifted from 1:10 to 1:6 between 2013 and 2017.

Where to start?

If your organization has only a few designers, start small by recruiting versatile designers who can work across customer research, service design, and UI design. These design pioneers bring initiative and energy, making them valuable in demonstrating the impact of design and sharing knowledge across the organization.

When design competence is more established, you can recruit specialists with deep expertise in narrower areas. The long-term goal of increasing design maturity is to make design and design methods an integral part of the company’s vision, strategy, and decision-making processes.

The result is a company that optimally benefits from design, where customer experience unites teams and processes into a cohesive whole, and the organization operates with a shared customer-centric vision, strategy, and approach.