Facilitating a Design Maturity Survey
Unfolding the different understandings of design
If you want to conduct your own Design Maturity Survey check these tools and resources.
What is the value of design
Working at airberlin, which had more than 7.000 employees also meant different views, processes, working styles, and values on how to design products. While those views can fire up new perspectives and lead to innovation, they also can block a company from reaching a consensus and moving forward. As the design team grew more mature, we realised the value we can add to the product creation process through research and data-based decisions. However, the majority still saw design as something that gives a product aesthetic. To understand why views and approaches differed so much per department, I needed to look into the state of design at airberlin.
Exploring design maturity
In 2015 I read about the Design Value Index and was fascinated by the way it approached the value of design not by its methods or tools but the way it showed the impact design has on the outcome. It appeared that there is a correlation between how good design is integrated into the overall process of creating products and the value it can add to the outcome. So I knew I need to find out how good our integration of design was at airberlin.
Conducting the survey
On my journey to figure out how to research the state of design at airberlin I came across the Design Maturity Survey from the Artefactgroup. The survey is a questionnaire focusing on five areas of design: Mastery, Empathy, Character, Performance and Impact, providing questions within each area which have to be rated on a scale from 1 to 5. Each participant saw their results based on their answers per area at the end and could see how the aggregated data for the company looked like.Incomplete but helpful
Even when I left airberlin before I could finish the conclusion on the survey results, I saw conducting the survey already had an impact on people. We recognised a higher interest in our work. Some even mentioned that they had no idea that we do prototyping and user research to see if a product meets the user needs. We also noticed that people were more open to our views in discussions, to get a new angle. Doing the survey definitely helped raseing awarness for the value of design.My role and learnings
As the initiator, conductor and analyst of the survey, I hoped that the survey results could help the C-level understand the value of design. Unfortunately, I left airberlin before I was able to complete my strategy recommendation for the C-Level, so it never got implemented on a bigger scale. Nonetheless, I saw that conducting the survey already had an impact on the people of each department which participated (marketing, web development, product and design). Knowing the maturity level for each department also helped us to understand how we need to communicate and make the benefit of design tangible for specific departments. I can say that the insights I gained from this survey help me a lot these days understanding why departments or teams sometimes have a hard time understanding each other. Seeing companies sharing more of their insights and studies like Invision’s Design Maturity Model or McKinsey’s The Business Value of Design is helping a lot to advocate for design maturity.
