The Clearleft Podcast

This is the Clearleft podcast. My name is Jeremy. I’m one of the cofounders of Clearleft.

I was chatting recently with my colleague Jon Aizlewood, design director at Clearleft. He spends quite a bit of time talking to clients and potential clients.

I quite like speaking to folks and just understanding what it is they really are looking for whether or not they realize what they’re looking for.

I help connect the dots as it were. How Clearleft operate and how we work, what we provide, how best we work with clients, and helping them get us on board.

It struck me that Jon has talked to an enormous range of organizations. There must be quite a difference in their levels of design maturity.

The maturity of certain organizations plays a part. I’ll be honest, it’s pretty eye-opening when you speak to clients who just have everything in order.

I spoke to one client a couple months ago and they were, they were just so on it with every single thing that I could potentially discuss. They were doing it already completely with aplomb in house. So there’s almost no need for us versus other ones who, you know, are what I would call the more design immature organizations, and they recognize the need. They just don’t have the capability to kind of get design going. It’s night and day. Right? I mean those folks just simply have no idea where to even start.

Design maturity for me would represent an ideal of what design would look like in an organization in order for this organization to make the most out of design and to use design as a competitive advantage.

That’s my colleague Maite.

My name is Maite Otondo. I’m a senior design researcher at Clearleft.

My name’s Andy Thornton and I’m a strategy director at Clearleft.

Andy and Maite worked together to figure out a way of assessing design maturity. One potentially useful tool for doing that is a survey.

How do you feel about the usefulness of surveys?

Are they:

a) very useful,

b) somewhat useful,

c) useful,

d) not useful or

e) not very useful at all.

We produced a survey so that we could sort of capture how design works within organizations of either the clients we work with or those that we’re interested in working with in the future, or just generally the industry at large.

“All right. I’m going to ask you a series of questions. Just relax and answer them as simply as you can.”

The idea was to have this model we could use with all our clients in order to help them improve the design practice and the role that design would play within their organization.

To create a survey where we could get a sense check, I suppose, get an understanding of how design was operating within various organizations at various scales of various sizes at various levels of sophistication I suppose from industry to industry.

“I already had an IQ test this year. I don’t think I’ve ever had any…”

“Reaction time is a factor in this so please pay attention. Now answer as quickly as you can.”

So last year I was involved in the analysis of that survey, the first design maturity survey, which was called design effectiveness.

You can see the findings from that first design effectiveness report online at clearleft.com/designeffectiveness2019

The first survey I would say was us dipping our toe in the water of trying to just do some primary research with the design industry about what’s going on in design. It wasn’t really targeted around saying we’re going to make some sort of maturity assessment or we’re going to, we’re going to interrogate what that means. We did produce some blog posts and some very simple research reports off the back of that.

It was kind of an exploration of how design effectiveness could be defined or could be understood.

Clearleft are not the only ones trying to survey the landscape of design maturity.

This is definitely something that other organizations are interested in.

I think, especially organizations that support other organizations in order to improve the design capabilities and the impact that design can have within those organizations. So mainly consultancies or Invision or Adobe.

Invision did a state of the industry report. And that was really nice and sophisticated. It does a really good job of explaining the sophistication of design within the industry.

Invision they have this very detailed report.

We did a big study. To our knowledge it’s one of the biggest studies out there across lots of different teams to try to understand teams at different levels, what leads to success and, how we might chart a path forward for all of us. About 2200 companies participated in this. They were around the world across lots of different types of markets. And fascinating patterns emerged from this.

That’s Aarron Walter speaking at Clearleft’s Leading Design conference in New York last year.

He played back some of the findings from that immense survey.

I could just give you excerpts from that talk, but I thought, why not go straight to the source?

I’m Aarron Walter and I lead the content team at Invision.

I’ve known Aarron for many years. We’ve both seen lots of changes in the industry.

I started by asking Aarron if the discipline of digital design itself has matured in recent years.

There are a number of companies, especially maybe in some laggard industries that don’t really understand the business value of design. They don’t see it as a way to create competitive advantage.

Design has scaled a lot in the past four years. Back when I started at Invision, a 20 person design team was a big team. And now we see pretty typically like insurance companies and financial institutions with teams, design teams that are 150 or more. And so, larger teams has led to, operationalizing those teams and getting them to plug into the company and that plugging into the company thing is the part that’s really, really important.

There’s a recognition in the design industry that as it works more closely with business and as it gets more sophisticated that it needs to do a better job of describing the value that it delivers back to the business.

So design has grown up in the way that it thinks about its work, as its function inside the business. Can’t just be about craft. Can’t just be about fonts and leading and colours and UI, it’s gotta be about how design as a craft and design as a set of methodologies plugs into the business and creates value for the business.

We always have the same tools at our hands, but the emphasis is different. And I think that’s true with design maturity that, early on just focusing on craft is great. That’s a good thing. And that’s what gets people excited. Usually that’s why we get into design. There’s a point at which it’s too limiting where you’re so focused inwardly that you can’t actually achieve bigger goals.

You’re very limited by that. And so we learn to develop these other skills, social skills and, you know, negotiation and leadership. And when we build those skills, we still have craft in the background and we have people on our teams who are really good at that. So we can use that to advance those other skills as well.

I definitely agree that design needs to talk the talk of business. And you know, that’s part of, one of those factors of can design prove its worth? Can design show value? Because if you can’t show value, why would you take it seriously? Why would you invest in it?

“When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a senior designer, I put the ways of childhood behind me. For now we see through a revenue forecast, darkly.”

So design maturity is a way to codify those learnings to help us see these are the traits and the characteristics of the teams who are having the greatest impact on their business. And if we can do that, if we can articulate that we can help lots of design teams advance and mature more rapidly and in doing so that makes design more influential in business.

I guess this idea of growing up and maturing isn’t unique to design. It feels like other disciplines have already been through this process.

When you look at more mature disciplines, like engineering has gone through this cycle, this exact same cycle of growth and dysfunction, and a lot of entropy and chaos. Let’s create a methodology and a system for working together.

It’s kind of like city states forming inside of the business and then the city states have to learn to play nice and work together.

Sales teams and engineering teams and product teams and executive teams all have a maturity model. And just the existence of a maturity model is an indication that it’s a discipline that is more mature, that it has been very thoughtful about how it operates.

So how did Aarron and the team at Invision even start to assess the state of design maturity?

We have relationships with thousands of design teams around the world. We spend a lot of time talking to them, visiting them, studying them. And we start to, we start to gather this anecdotal evidence and we took a very, very early stab at creating a model of, you know, these are the things that we see of the teams that are really successful.

And, that proved to be not super accurate.

So we thought going into it, that things like ratios of designers to developers, to product managers, product owners, that that was going to be a key indicator of design maturity, that there was this like golden ratio, two designers, five developers or engineers, and one product person that was the golden ratio, but we found some highly mature companies, design teams that, you know, they didn’t have those ratios. They had really imbalanced ratios and yet they were still very successful. Design was really creating a lot of value for the business.

But then, Leah Buley joined our team and did a really, really careful study. From that study of 2200 companies, a model emerged, we did a factor analysis of all our responses and looked at different cohorts.

And this five stage model was just like really clear in the data that resulted.

The five stage model looks like this:

At level one, you’ve got producers.

At level two, you’ve got connectors.

At level three, you’ve got architects.

At level four, you’ve got scientists.

And at level five, you’ve got visionaries.

Let’s take a look at each of these.

One.

First level one, we call them producers. This is where design is really focused on a screen. They’re not thinking about a customer journey. They’re not thinking about design as it relates to what the business is trying to do for the customer. It’s really just like let’s wireframe this, let’s comp this, maybe we create an interactive prototype and we do some usability testing.

Those are producers, but they tend to be a very isolated group. We think of them as like they’re on an island. Design is speaking its own language. It’s not really integrated into the rest of the company and the teams.

Two

This second level is they’re connectors, and they’re starting to think about design, not just as we’re making screens, but how do we teach our partners and our colleagues in the company that design is more?

So they start to do design thinking workshops in the company. They don’t necessarily call them design thinking workshops, because that sounds like, you know, if you’re an engineer, why would I go to a design workshop when I’m not a designer? So they come up with clever names like innovation workshops. Innovation? I want to be part of that! Right? So it, it brings in partnership and conversation.

They start to get more stakeholder input into the work. So they invite stakeholders to design reviews. They might even do some rapid sketching, like crazy eights, exercise from the sprint process, they might do that with partners in product or engineering, maybe even executives, sales or marketing.

So there’s more integration at this point between designer and developer tools. That’s a really key thing. If we’re going to start to connect our efforts, we need to have interoperability.

So it’s really design trying to focus on what I call the IO layer, you know, input output, how might we connect with other people?

Three

Level three, these are architects. And that’s where they really start to operationalize and think about that IO layer very carefully.

So key activities are things like they’re doing daily stand ups to make sure that they are clearing roadblocks and connecting with each other’s work and collaborating, staying really focused on that. They’re doing more detailed planning and prioritization. They’re getting more sophisticated at creating design briefs. These are our shared assumptions. Here’s where we’re going together. And they document their work so other people know what’s happening.

They’re still doing usability testing, starting to think about customer satisfaction in various levels. And they start to influence revenue, which isa key shift, because design now has this more sophisticated IO layer, which is usually design operations.

This is where design operations comes into play. There’s been investment in design in the company from the top, and there’s more head count, more people. And there’s sophistication around operations and somebody is running design operations.

Four

Scientists, level four. So scientists, they start to do things like concept testing, AB testing, analytics, you know, using a lot of data.

So now you’ve got partnerships between design and data science. That leads to a lot of very careful experimentation.

This is where there’s a huge tipping point in the value that design creates for the company.

Employee productivity goes up. They start to enter new markets successfully. They start to move faster. So faster time to market. They start to save money. So there’s cost savings instead of launching with something that’s wildly miscalculated for the audience that that business is trying to target. They’ve done all the small experiments and tiny bets early on so they know the trajectory of where they’re going.

Five

Level five. They are visionaries. Now they are looking into the future.

Companies like McKinsey used this metaphor of horizon one and horizon two. Horizon one is what we’re working on in the next few months. Maybe up to a year. But what could we be working on two, three years down the road, as culture changes as the world changes? That starts to influence what type of products and services companies might want to get into.

And they’re thinking about the customer journey end to end. And they’re developing these cross-platform strategies.

So these level five visionaries are doing trendspotting and foresight analysis. They’re doing product market fit tests. They’re creating vision artifacts, could be videos, small documentaries, interactive prototypes that are really sophisticated.

It’s really about that craft again. It’s about, you know, trendspotting so it’s research and problem solving, but it’s also then turning that into a story that other people can see and experience. So you can bring them along to create something bigger.

This five stage model sounds very logical and appealing, but is real life really that straightforward?

Design maturity’s complex. There’s not just like a simple kind of input and output.

It’s really not a linear process. It’s messy, it’s complicated.

That is very true. It is nonlinear. In almost all cases, we have seen that growth in terms of design maturity is not linear. You don’t start at one and then go do two and three. It’s kind of happening in an ad-hoc way. The five levels is a way for us to slice it and group cohorts and, and think about you know, the specific behaviors and traits.

That’s usually one of the problems of any kind of maturity models is that you would assume that maturity is linear and also that progress is linear and it’s not the case.

The maturity model is just a framework for people to think about this. But all models, they are all wrong. Because they oversimplify reality. So in a way, I think I would use that as a way to open a conversation. Rather than saying, this is the only way you could mature design in your organization, or this is the only criteria for design to be successful within an organization.

Cause the starting point is that the model won’t represent reality as it is. And the complexity of reality.

So that’s why I think understanding the context is so relevant. Because really maturity is not the same for every company and also the way you progress and the steps you take are not the same.

It sounds to me like one of the biggest challenges with the five stage model of design maturity is that it could potentially clash with company culture.

Every organization is trying to tackle a problem that will involve some level of design, which is just basically conscious problem solving.

Andy wrote a post about this on the Clearleft blog. The blog post is called A Universal Theory for Design Ops, but don’t let that put you off.

In this post, Andy gives three different examples of company cultures and their attitude to design. Each one is illustrated with a fictional company example.

Scenario one is the Hooli problem. Their motto is “Design just slows us down.” This is design by engineering.

There are a number of organizations with a strong engineering pedigree, especially start-ups, you know, tech startups, that sort of space, even, you know, larger enterprise companies that rely on a lot of legacy technical infrastructure, you know, design has come late to the game at those organizations.

And so it’s already got to compete with a very established function within the business, which is much more oriented around what’s technically feasible.

Scenario two is the Wayne Enterprises problem. Their motto is “I can’t see the return on investment of design.” This is design by business case.

Some businesses overindex and overemphasize on metrics that are easier to measure, not necessarily the right things to measure. And design in some instances can be very, very hard to measure, you know, especially when you’re talking about well user experience, let’s just say. You can measure it in simplistic ways in terms of usability, in terms of how fast it takes you to complete a signup form.

Yes. That’s a very simplistic way to look at user experience, but, you know, user experience is complex, it involves brand, it involves trust. Those things are actually incredibly, incredibly difficult to measure and that conversation doesn’t usually land very easily at a boardroom. People don’t like to hear the fact that design is difficult to measure.

Scenario three is the Cyberdyne Systems problem. Their motto is “Less thinking, more colouring in.” This is design by naivety. I thought this one sounded like the most frustrating scenario.

Interesting that actually, maybe that comes across as the most frustrating point. I think it’s the one that’s the easiest to deal with oddly enough, because organizations that are don’t have a sophisticated understanding of design in and of itself, i.e. they see it as a very tactical thing that helps you make something look better, or more pleasant, more aesthetically satisfying. I think actually those are usually the experiences that you have the biggest opportunity to show what design can do, because there’s usually not a preexisting bias there. There’s just a simple lack of sophistication about what design is really.

Regardless of the company culture you’ve got, if you want to improve your company’s design maturity, the first step has to be admitting that you could be doing better.

I think, you know, step one is, is realizing you’ve got a problem, right? You’ve got to realize that there’s there’s opportunity for improvement and accept that.

I think almost any design leader is going to have the realization that I know we could be doing things better. I just don’t know what it is that we should be doing.

So the design maturity assessment, is a way to see around corners. You know, here’s where we are and here’s where we’re going. So you know your trajectory and how to take action today. That feels good.

And then, to see around the corner of six months from now, a year from now, as we make these improvements. These are the problems that will crop up that we’ll have to confront next. Versus, you know, kind of groping in the dark and not knowing, I don’t know if we’re going the right way, if we’re doing the right thing and improving. So, you know, having that roadmap for your team is very helpful.

It sounds like every organization could benefit from taking a design maturity assessment.

I had just one last question for Aarron.

“Do you ever take that test yourself?”

Has Invision taken the survey?

This is going to sound crazy, but, we have yet to test ourselves. We’ve been very focused on creating this model and it’s a process that we’re actually going to be going through in the very near future. And I can tell you that, we’re, we’re going through the same experience, it’s the shared experience as our customers who feel like, this fear of like, where am I going to stand? We know we’ve got some things to work on, but we’re not sure what, so we’re, we’re going to go through that and take a hard look at where we stand and continue to advance our own practice.

Remember that design effectiveness report from Clearleft? That was released last year in 2019. This year, there’s a new survey.

I think what we’re doing more practically now with the new survey is we’re trying to establish a set of criteria by which we can come back and measurably assess design maturity, with all of the sort of shortfalls of that will entail naturally of like trying to measure something in a concrete way that can be quite abstract.

I’d really like it if you’d participate in the 2020 survey. You can find it at bit.ly/designmaturity2020

That’s bit.ly/designmaturity2020

Thanks for listening.