UX MATURITY:
THE REALITY
OF PERFORMANCE
@simon_norris
I’m Simon the CEO of Nomensa a UX company with offices in London, Bristol and soon to
be Amsterdam. I’m delighted to be presenting and sharing knowledge about my take on UX
strategy and how we applied it to Liberty Global.

A starling murmuration. We can see thousands of starlings flying together in
synchronicity. Each starling’s movement is influenced by every other starling. It
doesn’t matter whether it’s two starlings or thousands, the synchronicity scales and
can be thought of as a scale-free correlation. The bird at the back follows the pattern
of the bird at the front regardless of whether they can see each other because they
follow their neighbours.

“The movement from
lower-level rules to
higher-level sophistication”
Steve Anderson
There is a Gestalt Effect at work where the total is greater than the sum of the parts.
I believe UX Strategy is no different. Any UX Strategy needs to support both lower-
level and higher-level activities and rules. That is what makes UX Strategy both
complex and beautiful… an experiential murmuration.

“Strive for perfection in everything you do.
Take the best that exists and make it better.
When it does not exist, design it.”
Sir Henry Royce
This is an ode to UX strategy and I believe UX Strategy is a ‘designerly’ activity.

ACT I
THE IMPORTANCE OF UX
Digital seems to be everywhere and constantly creeping into anything and
everything. On a daily basis digital is being blended into aspects of our lives that
previously seemed impossible, unrealistic and irrelevant. Digital is changing things
every day.

DIGITAL = UX
So where is the store in a digital world?

In our phones? Out there on the street?

In our heads?
It’s in all of these places and more.

The really good companies have been busily building ecosystems to support
individual behaviour. Each one of us represents a single variable within a much
larger system. Determining the influence that exists within a system should be
considered a critical activity.

SMART OFFICESMART HOME
SMART CITY SMART LIFE
We are being bombarded with the use of the ‘smart’ metaphor. I think UX is
synonymous with ‘smart’ and I believe thinking in this way supports the efforts of
digital transformation.

ACT II
MEASURING UX
So how do we measure UX? We need a language of measurement. To understand
how to measure UX we need to understand some fundamental ideas about the
history of our craft, systems and behaviour.

Digital first is a guiding philosophy
that places digital at the heart of
the organisation, because
it is working towards becoming
totally digitally integrated.

FINANCE MARKETING I.T. HR
DIGITAL FIRST
SALES
The really savvy organisations are making digital part of their organisation and
thinking beyond the limitation of a department mentality. This is what I mean when I
use the phrase 'Digital First'.
Digital First is a way of thinking. It represents so much more than being digital or
having a website.

If we fly too low we see little perspective…

…if we fly too high we see little detail.

Key moments
of interaction
We can design an ecosystem or the lower level artefacts and rules. Once designed
things just emerge!

Interestingly, it allows us to also design the key moments of interaction for the
journey. User journeys build the foundation that allows us to move towards an
ecological way of thinking.

Key moments
of interaction
In an ecosystem the idea of a single journey seems nonsense, because many
journeys will overlap.

One of the biggest problems I encounter with UX is what I call the ‘Fallacy of the
immediate’ or the 'view from the top of the mountain'.

The view at the top of the mountain will always represent a micro aspect of a much
bigger and longer journey. We have to consider the whole journey and the entire
mountain. As UX strategists, we have to fly at the right height and be aware of both
the context and the details.

The total interaction is
greater than the sum
of all interactions.

Another important concept is understanding the relationship between the Micro-
Macro aspects of the design.

Understanding the smaller aspects of behaviours is essential to understanding the
macro behaviours. They are correlated. However, too much focus is all too often
placed on the micro - the User Interface, the Content - the components of the
experience that form part of the whole or the ‘gestalt’.

We need some UX

I believe we have to think in an ecological way because we cannot apply UX or UX
Strategy from a spray can. If only.

Look at the same two sports cars side by side. Two different colours: red and blue.
Does anyone think that the Blue car will go faster than the red car or vice versa
because of the colour it’s painted!?

ACT III
APPLYING
UX STRATEGICALLY

$18.1BIL
REVENUE
38,000
EMPLOYEES
14
ACTIVE COUNTRIES
52MIL
HOMES PASSED
27MIL
CUSTOMERS
56MIL
RGU’S
So let’s talk about applying UX strategically by discussing what Liberty Global did
about UX Strategy.

UK BelgiumGermany Netherlands
Austria Czech
Republic
Hungary RomaniaPoland
IrelandSwitzerland
LG is a pan-European multi-brand reality. I’ve done a lot of UX Strategy work for
single-brand realities but nothing on this scale, this complex… it perplexed me
deeply… I like to be perplexed.

“…provide a world class digital User
Experience, which also differentiates us from
competition, and which supports our
commercial objectives…”
This is ambition. An ambition I hear from many companies looking to leverage the
power of UX.

Connect.Discover.Be free.
The LG corporate identity is
Connect. Discover. Be Free.

Desire
for content
Desire
for
engagement
Relationship to
digital technology
Connect. Discover. Be free.
They envisaged 3 UX principles to drive the UX Strategy:
Relationship to digital technology
Desire for content
Desire for engagement

Connect
Desire
for content
Desire
for
engagemen
t
Relationship to
digital technology
Connect. Discover. Be free.
Our early thinking resulting in us combining them.
Connect - relationship to digital technology
Discover - desire for content
Be Free - desire for engagement
We do not generalise CX as UX because we believe this does not lend itself well to
differentiation or understanding.

Chemistry and physics are branches of science
that both study matter.
The difference between the two lies in their
scope and approach.

What is User Experience?
THE EXPERIENCE WITHIN THE INDIVIDUAL TOUCH POINTS
DEFINES THE USERS PERCEPTION ABOUT THE BRAND
Customer Experience (CX)
The sum of all experiences a customer
can have with a brand and it’s products.
User Experience (UX)
The Interaction within and across each
digital touch point.
We think the same way about CX and UX. They are both branches of design that can be applied
to study and support experience.

CX
UX
2015
We should not judge the current status quo relationship of CX and UX and think this will
represent the norm in the future. Digital encourages ‘blended spaces’ thinking and the
relationship is positively poised to favour UX over CX.

CX
UX
2020 and beyond…
One cannot provide a truly compelling UX Strategy without having awareness of its implications.
Strategy and implementation are fundamentally different. We have to understand how to
translate the strategy into implementation. In terms of UX that means understanding the
designerly implications of digital.

“However beautiful
the strategy, you
should occasionally
look at the results.”
Sir Winston Churchill

Increased use of digital channels
Increased sales revenues (RGUs)
Increased customer satisfaction (NPS)
Reduced costs to serve customers
Increased self-service use
Increased brand loyalty and advocacy
Increase in repeat buying behaviours
Increased customer lifetime value
Measuring Success
All UX work should start with data and
analytics to determine
success metrics.
Analysis should be supported by user
research to enable data driven design
decisions.
Once a project is launched a test,
learn and improve programme should
be initiated.
Business Benefits of UX
In all the points listed we didn’t mention once ‘a better user experience for customers’ because it
is implied. At this level, UX strategy alleviates a business problem and supports the objectives
listed within the corporate strategy.

Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)
What is the financial value of a customer? How much should be invested? These are
fundamental questions. Answering them allows us to understand the future net profit from a
client relationship.

We mapped their strategy to three fundamental activities…acquisition; onboarding and retention.

Digital
First
Rich Media
Content
Triple
Penetration
Data &
MCI
Innovatio
n
Economies of
Scale
Corporate
Responsibility
Public
Policy
“Creating a seamless and relevant digital
experience
across all our digital touch points”
We showed how taking a Digital First approach would leverage benefit and positively influence
CLV.

How do you move from theory
and models
to design?
With most responses to RFPs it all boils down to the approach you provide and
supporting rationale.

Stage 1 Stage 5Stage 3Stage 2 Stage 4
Strategy Stream
Tactical Stream
Institutionalisation Stream
Innovation Stream
Business
Customer
Context
It also allowed us to separate Institutionalisation from Innovation. Our approach
focused around the use and development of an Experience Framework to drive
greater engagement and therefore CLV.
Our approach comprised of 4 streams that would be carefully choreographed and
cascaded together led by the strategy stream and held together by a UX framework.
This allows us to separate strategy from tactical project requests or insights from
quick wins. Insights are rare… quick wins are common.

Vision & Strategy Tactical
InnovationInstitutionalisation
Experience
Framework
This shows how their brands can be aligned and most importantly that all the brands don’t need to be
centrally aligned - it allows for differences because there will be differences in the team, its size,
capability, technology use, culture etc.

The greater the alignment the greater the
value to extract from the framework
Another benefit of UX Maturity is it can be used to determine the ‘strategic value gap’ that exists
between the business value that UX can support and the capabilities required to deliver (or reduce) the
value gap.

Definition of maturity:
The quality or state
of being mature
The categories (stages of UX maturity) overlap. These categories should not be thought of discretely.
Each category has a threshold that needs to be reached to demonstrate capability within that category.
Most organisation’s UX capabilities will sit between the ‘aware’ and ‘synchronised’ categories. There
are still massive opportunities to apply UX strategically to compete and engage more effectively.

Customer First
User Experience Strategy
Customer
experience
maps
User journeys Personas
Digital First
(Institutionalisation)
A fundamental objective for the LG UX Strategy (and any UX
Strategy) is embedding a deeper sense of UX maturity across the
organisation. This meant engaging people at different levels of UX
understanding, across different businesses, with different objectives,
cultures and needs.

UX Strategy represents
the UX behind the UX
We ran a lot of workshops to encourage collaboration and UX
understanding. We set a challenge to design 3 new and
commercially relevant user journeys. A Customer Journey Map was
built-up, the journey focused on CLV (acquisition, on boarding and
retention).

Let’s look at the onboarding journey for Fred which we named Guest
Pass. We used an innovative way to bring the customer journeys to
life. This highlights the key problem with UX - people understanding
it! We use videos to create common ground and communicate
complex interaction.

So, where’s the design?
This is typically the bit that gets the client excited. It’s also why
digital can appear broken and the starting point for many projects.
My final thought is to think of UX Strategy as a team effort that
requires choreography and lots of practice and when done well, the
results will look and feel beautiful.

THANK YOU
@simon_norris