User Experience Capacity-Building (UXCB)

Research Project

How can organizations better understand and strengthen their UX practices?

Despite the rapid growth in the UX industry over the last decade, many organizations struggle to create a consistent user-centered culture. To address this challenge, we are developing UX Capacity Building (UXCB) as an organizing concept to describe all activities regarding the identification, development, and evaluation of strategies for growing a healthy, self-sustaining, and robust UX practice.

Table of Contents

Background

The User Experience (UX) industry’s rapid growth over the past decade has been largely driven by the desire of organizations across nearly every sector to create their own internal UX teams. But to realize the full potential of an effective in-house UX team, organizations must also make several adjustments to their existing practices and processes. They must also be able to:

  • regularly monitor and collect user feedback;
  • maintain sustainable processes to quickly analyze this feedback and use it to inform design changes; and
  • effectively coordinate the work of all the teams involved in product design and development to implement these changes.


For many organizations, these adjustments require a making fundamental shifts to their operations, strategies, and culture. In other words, creating an in-house team is not enough; organizations must also begin to build a pervasive user-centered culture that:

  1. prioritizes user research,
  2. places value on the design process, and
  3. commits to the iterative cycle of assessment and improvement.


Unfortunately, many organizations are unable to create or sustain this culture due to a misunderstanding (or lack of awareness) of key UX principles, an inability (or unwillingness) to provide sufficient resources to support UX work, or some combination. As a result, UX can get pushed aside in favor of other priorities or the UX team is asked to do too much, leaving them under-resourced and over-burdened. Even organizations with a well-developed UX practice can find it difficult to sustain it due to high turnover, changes in leadership, or other external forces.

User Experience Capacity-Building (UXCB) is a solution to these challenges.

What is UXCB?

We define UXCB as the intentional work to continuously create and sustain overall organizational processes that make quality UX work routine. An organization’s UX capacity is their actual, enacted UX practices; UXCB is any activity intentionally designed to strengthen or sustain those practices.

Our UXCB conceptual model (see MacDonald, 2019) is a basic three-part  model (show below) in which (1) the current conditions of an organization drive the selection of (2) strategies chosen to build UX capacity, which lead to (3) outcomes at the individual, organizational, and product levels. In turn, these outcomes create different conditions for future capacity-building initiatives, thus setting up UXCB as a continuous cycle of organizational growth and development.

The conceptual model for User Experience Capacity-Building (UXCB). A basic three-part logic model in which (1) the current conditions of an organization drive the selection of (2) UXCB strategies, which lead to (3) outcomes at the individual, organizational and product levels.

UX Capacity Assessment Framework

UX capacity is split into two components – the capacity to “do” UX and the capacity to “use” UX – because an effective organization must be able to first select and apply UX design and research methods before they can incorporate insights gained from those methods. We developed the UX Capacity Assessment Framework (UXCAF; see MacDonald, Sosebee, & Srp, 2022) as a a tool to help organizations understand the strengths and limitations of their current UX practices, mainly in preparation for a UXCB initiative. The UXCAF includes 21 concepts split into six dimensions: people, resources, practices and processes, organizational literacy, organizational decision-making, and benefits.

Download the full UX Capacity Assessment Framework

Overview of UX Capacity. The Capacity to Do UX (people, resources, practices and processes) and the Capacity to Use UX (organizational literacy, organizational decision-making, benefits).

Related Publications

Building User Experience (UX) Capacity to Support Digital Transformation: A Case Study of Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum

Full Paper

MacDonald, Villaespesa, Kingberg, Kisicki, and Jackson (2023)
To take full advantage of the potential offered by the digital space, museums and cultural institutions must be able to consistently apply User Experience (UX) methods to create enjoyable and understandable digital interfaces. Unfortunately, many of these organizations lack the resources and in-house expertise to consistently and effectively apply UX methods when designing (or re-designing) their digital products and related services. Our solution to this challenge is to engage in UX Capacity-Building (UXCB), a process through which any organization can gradually create a more UX-friendly culture and build a sustainable and effective internal UX practice. In this paper, we present a case study of implementing a UXCB initiative for Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, over a nine-month period. We provide a detailed description of our UXCB process, an analysis of how our work impacted the museum’s UX capacity, and reflections about the applicability of our model to other museums and cultural organizations.
Full Text

A Framework for Assessing Organizational User Experience (UX) Capacity

Full Paper

MacDonald, C. M., Sosebee J. & Srp, A. (2022).
Organizations across every industry are seeking to adopt effective User Experience (UX) practices, but they often struggle through an expensive process of trial and error because there is no standard methodology or approach for doing so. To address this challenge, we present the UX Capacity Assessment Framework (UXCAF) as a comprehensive tool for helping organizations understand the strengths and limitations of their current UX practices and identify targeted improvement strategies. Developed through a literature review and interviews with UX professionals, the UXCAF includes 21 concepts split into six dimensions of UX capacity: people, resources, practices and processes, organizational literacy, organizational decision-making, and benefits. We apply the UXCAF to three organizations in different sectors to show how organizations of any type and size can learn how to improve their internal UX practices and stay competitive in an increasingly digital world.
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Permanent Link

User Experience (UX) Capacity-Building: A Conceptual Model and Research Agenda

Full Paper

MacDonald, C. M. (2019).
Many User Experience (UX) practitioners face organizational barriers that limit their ability to influence product decisions. Unfortunately, there is little concrete knowledge about how to systematically overcome these barriers to optimize UX work and foster a stronger organizational UX culture. This paper introduces the concept of User Experience Capacity-Building (UXCB) to describe the process of building, strengthening, and sustaining effective UX practices throughout an organization. Through an integrated literature review of relevant HCI and capacity-building research, this paper defines UXCB and proposes a conceptual model that outlines the conditions, strategies, and outcomes that define a UXCB initiative. Five areas of future research are presented that aim to deepen our understanding of UXCB as both a practice and an area of scholarship.
Download Full-Text (ACM)

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