“What are the UX benchmarks for organizations of different maturity?”

Written By Editors Unbuilt Labs

by Marvin Cheung, Head of Research and Strategy

While it takes a long time for big corporations to incorporate UX fully into their decision-making processes, new ventures would have a much easier time finding Product-Market Fit if they incorporate UX best practices from Day 1. 

Realistically, even strong UX Designers at a startup will be limited by time, budget, and resources. We have several benchmarks that take resource constraints into account to help you determine whether your venture is ahead of or behind the curve. Bear in mind that being ahead ie. confirming something before you have enough data to support a decision, can cause problems down the road as well. 

  • Pre-MVP: Once you have a vision, you should have a few brand assets, such as a pixel-perfect logo and a name. Logos and names are the most difficult to change, so you want to try to get this right. You can also make some basic branding decisions such as whether you want to go with a white or dark theme, what colors to use (ideally two to three), and what fonts you want to use. Generally, we recommend picking a header font from Google Fonts, since it has the most third-party support, and a body font from the list of Web Safe Fonts for page speed, legibility, and general ease of use. 

  • MVP: When you are making quick iterations, there is nothing wrong with using User Interface (UI) packs and templates. You can also use no-code solutions eg. Wix or Squarespace to test landing pages and ideas. We recommend wireframing and rapid prototyping to test out as many ideas as you can before committing anything to code. The platform you use will pose certain design constraints so there are times when you will have to be creative with how you translate your mockup into the final interface. You should also begin to think about quantitative user research at this point.

  • Pre-Scale Up: Before you make a big marketing push, you want to clean up your design. Some startups, often ones led by entrepreneurs without a design background, will opt for a rebrand at this stage as users in the early majority category tend to have certain product and design expectations. By cleaning up design quirks and optimizing the user flow, you will have a more efficient marketing funnel as well. This translates to cost savings.

  • Scale Up and beyond: You should have a coherent design system at this stage with reusable components. Especially for consumer products with a wide user base, small design changes can have a large impact on revenue. Scale Ups and beyond tend to focus on interaction design and microinteractions. Some organizations go further and employ a corporate nudging team that will use behavioural sciences to promote certain behaviours, though the ethics of such is contested. 

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Editors Unbuilt Labs
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