Time to grow up

The customer has been at the heart of Odido for years. But Odido wanted more: a significant step forward in their UX maturity. It’s a tricky term, but put simply, UX maturity means that your entire organisation operates as much as possible from the customer’s perspective. It means taking their needs into account early on in the design process. And you do this because it makes your product or service more valuable. 

In this case study, we’ll briefly take you through how that works: becoming UX-mature.

Odido wants to become UX-mature, but what does that actually mean? They want to gain a better understanding of their customers’ needs and the journey they go through. The customer experience needs to become more visible and more important within the organisation. This will enable them to design products and make decisions that better meet customers’ needs. Because Odido knows that happy customers and good business go hand in hand.

You don’t become an adult overnight. Nor does an organisation become UX-mature overnight. That requires a plan – a maturity plan. Together with Odido, we’ve set a goal on the horizon; a place where they’d most like to be, something to work towards. The first steps have been taken, and we’re now gradually ensuring that Odido will soon be able to carry on on its own.

CX Strategy & Organisation
Training Courses
UXR Coaching

It starts with a UX maturity plan

A UX maturity plan sets out specific steps and actions to put the customer even more at the centre. We base these steps and actions on your organisation’s maturity level. We assess your organisation’s current UX maturity using our maturity canvas – this canvas is available to download for free, so you can work through it at your leisure and find out for yourself where you stand.

Once the plan is in place, there’s work to be done

Once the plan was in place, we helped Odido get everything off to a good start, both at an operational and a management level. We provided support, we coached, and we built bridges between teams. We raised awareness of the potential of research. We ran training sessions for designers so they could carry out their own research more often. And if there were any issues with the implementation or the plan, we sorted them out. 

You need to work on your mindset, skillset and toolset

If we break down the concept of UX maturity, we see three layers that your organisation needs to work on: mindset, skillset and toolset.

Mindset. A user-centred approach must have broad support, otherwise the plan will fail. At Odido, a small group of us went into the organisation to get teams and stakeholders on board with our vision. It’s important to make it tangible. One way we did this was through a ​‘customer café’: in short 15-minute conversations with five participants, all teams across the organisation – content managers, designers, developers – get the chance to present their ideas to customers. The customer café is not a substitute for larger-scale research – think of it as something extra. Purely for the mindset. A way to test small features and questions. It requires little effort, but it does ensure that the customer increasingly comes to life across all parts of the organisation.

Skillset. Without the right skills, you won’t get very far. Depending on the team and its stage of maturity, we determine which training courses are relevant to help them take the next step forward. At Odido, for example, we provided interview training to teams with no prior research experience, so that they can engage with customers themselves in the future.

Toolset. If you want to put the customer at the centre, you need the right tools. An overview of research methods and techniques. Which type of research do you use when? And what’s required for that? For Odido, we created a ​‘research menu’, so that teams can quickly see how to engage customers. We’ve also introduced a number of tools. Condens, for example. This is a tool that helps you centrally collect and analyse insights from research. This ensures that knowledge isn’t confined to a single researcher, but that everyone can access it at any time. We also use TheyDo at Odido: our favourite tool for tracking customer journeys. It helps you identify the pain points, benefits and opportunities at each stage of the journey. And that, in turn, helps you prioritise: which action is most important? What can wait a little longer?
 

We’ll show you how, so you can do it yourself afterwards

Our expertise in UX maturity is based on over 20 years of research and design work. So, with a solid plan, we can quickly get companies like Odido up and running – saving them a lot of time and energy. But the most important part of achieving UX maturity is doing it yourself. We help get things off the ground and share our knowledge. We see it as our job to tackle the key challenges and get all teams across the organisation on board. But once that’s achieved, we hand over the reins. So that a sustainable, independent way of working takes root within your organisation. And of course: if needed, we’re always on hand to offer guidance from the sidelines.