Maturing a UX function

citizenM, a global hotel brand, wants to deliver the best digital experience in the hotel industry.

As the first full-time Head of UX, I was asked to lead the Product department in creating a digital guest experience that matches the quality and ambiance of the hotels.

Recognizing the need for a sustainable approach, I focused on growing and developing the UX team and citizenM’s UX maturity.

In my first nine months, the team and I launched several key initiatives that laid a solid foundation for ongoing growth and innovation, positioning us to continually enhance the digital guest experience.

Using an industry benchmark, we assessed our company's UX at level 3. Within a year, we are well on our way towards level 5.

SECTOR - Global hotel group, privately owned

SETTING - UX team in Product department in mid-size organization

MY ROLE - Head of UX. Leadership position responsible for UX maturity and team development

LEAD TIME - 9 months; ongoing

COMPLEXITY - High

Benchmarking and goal setting

My initial step was to develop a UX strategy and roadmap, with clear goals and objectives.

To track progress, we set the following performance indicators:

Customer Effort Score (CES)
Conversion Rate
User Feedback (interviews and micro-feedback surveys)
Customer Satisfaction (CSAT)
Net Promoter Score (NPS)
Stakeholder Involvement in UX Activities
Data-Driven Decision Making

After 9 months, the most impactful changes arose from a few key initiatives:

Team Building: a multidisciplinary team with external experts to bring fresh perspectives and increase the over quality of design and deliverables
Design System: acceleration of the design system to ensure consistency and efficiency across projects
Insights Pipeline and Feedback loops: a robust insights pipeline to continuously gather and analyze user data
UX Advocacy and Role-Modeling Customer Centricity: bring a culture of user-centricity throughout the organization by advocating for UX best practices and leading by example

Activities

UX strategy & roadmap

Research and Discovery
Define Goals and Objectives
Develop User Personas
Prioritize Initiatives
Create a UX Roadmap
Establish Metrics and KPIs

Team building

Assembling a multidisciplinary team to foster collaboration and innovation and increase the quality of design and deliverables
Focus on skill development and onboarding external experts to bring fresh perspectives

Design system development

Increasing efforts to build a unified design system for consistency and efficiency across projects
Establishing a governance model to ensure QA and collaboration

Building an insights pipeline

Implementing a robust insights pipeline to continuously gather and analyze user data
Integrating Data-Driven Practices to enhance the double Diamond model's discovery phase to ensure the development of effective, user-centered solutions
Developing UX metrics and key performance indicators to measure UX success
Review and analyze one year of micro-feedback to inform improvements
Establishing an internal Insights Repository to distribute UX guidelines and toolkits, aligning teams on user-centered design

UX advocacy & customer-centricity role-modeling

Insights and Knowledge sharing to share customer insights and knowledge across the organization
Customer-centric workshops to focus on customer-centric design and involve other teams
Encourage feedback loops to create channels for continuous feedback on UX practices
Hosting UX showcases to present and demo successful UX projects, boosting collaboration
UX metrics tracking to share UX performance data and highlight its business impact.