We Measured UX Maturity at 30 Software Companies. The XR Numbers Refused to Behave.

What I learned running Sri Lanka's first study on UX maturity and Extended Reality product performance.

By U.A.S. Denuwan Udahawatte · Design Engineer, UX & Front-End · MBA in Management of Technology, University of Moratuwa

In 2018, McKinsey gave Sri Lanka a Digital Quotient score of 35. The line that separates a "digital leader" from everyone else sits at 50. So we weren't just behind. In their words, we were a digital laggard.

That number bothered me for years. I work in Sri Lanka's software industry, which happens to be one of the country's biggest export earners: more than 500 companies, over 120,000 people, and above a billion US dollars in annual export revenue. Most of these firms ship at least one healthcare-related product. And yet, if you walk into almost any of them and ask who owns the user experience, you'll find a room full of front-end developers and very few UX designers.

Meanwhile, Extended Reality was arriving. AR, VR, MR. A global market headed toward hundreds of billions of dollars, already changing healthcare through surgical simulation, immersive therapy, and medical training. And XR design is unforgiving. It takes everything a flat-screen designer knows and adds a Z-axis, physical ergonomics, motion comfort, spatial cognition. If your organization can't do ordinary UX well, XR will find you out.

So for my MBA dissertation I asked a question I couldn't find answered anywhere for our market:

Does a company's UX maturity actually turn into higher-performing, user-centric XR products?

The global literature says yes, confidently. I wanted to know whether that held in Sri Lanka. It mostly did, until it very much didn't, and the part where it didn't turned out to be the most valuable finding of the whole study.

How I ran the study

I didn't want opinions. I wanted a measurable causal chain, so I built a model with three constructs:

1. UX Capability & Maturity (UXCM), the independent variable. Measured through six competencies borrowed from the Qualtrics XM maturity model: Lead, Realize, Activate, Enlighten, Respond, Disrupt.
2. UX Dimensions, the mediator, taken from Rukonić et al.'s UX Process Assessment Model (UXPAM): Artifacts, Methods, Resources, Literacy, Culture.
3. XR Product Performance, the dependent variable, measured with Nielsen's usability heuristics adapted to XR through Hillmann's work: Consistency, Cognition Reduction, Accuracy.

The theoretical gap I was trying to close is that existing maturity models (CMM, PRM, PAM) had never been combined with XR-specific design parameters. Fusing UXPAM with XR usability heuristics was the contribution.

For the sample, I went to SLASSCOM-registered software companies with 250+ employees and at least one healthcare product in their portfolio. Out of 40 firms I approached, 30 qualified, a 75% response rate. Two structured questionnaires went out. One went to 106 industry experts (managerial level and UX professionals), the other to 162 real users of the healthcare products those companies build. Both used 5-point Likert scales.

One choice I made deliberately: the experts rated organizational maturity, but actual users rated product performance. Managers grading their own products tends to produce comfortable answers, and I didn't want comfortable answers.

The analysis ran through SPSS for cleaning, reliability (Cronbach's α ≥ 0.70) and factor analysis, then Partial Least Squares Structural Equation Modeling in SmartPLS 4 with bootstrapped path coefficients. The dataset passed the usual gates: KMO of 0.804, Harman's single-factor at 36.96% (under the 50% threshold for common-method bias), HTMT below 0.80 for discriminant validity, SRMR of 0.14 for model fit.

What the data said

Some of the numbers behaved exactly as the textbooks promised.

UX maturity predicting UX practice came out at β = 0.784 with p < 0.001. Organizational maturity explains 61.5% of the variance in UX practice quality, which is a huge effect by any standard. Mature organizations really do produce better artifacts, methods, literacy, and culture. And when I tested the paths pairwise, every one of them was significant and positive. All four hypotheses were accepted, with UX Dimensions partially mediating the link between maturity and performance.

Then the model told me something nobody wanted to hear.

When I ran the full structural model with all three constructs together, the link between UX maturity and XR product performance collapsed. The R² for XR performance was a feeble 4.1%. Worse, the raw correlation between maturity and performance came out at −0.031. Negative. Insignificant. Pointing the opposite direction from everything the global literature predicts.

In other words: in the full Sri Lankan model, more organizational UX maturity did not measurably translate into better-performing products. Something in the local context was eating the effect, and I needed to find out what.

The detective work

A negative result is only a dead end if you stop there. I went back into the field and ran qualitative interviews with solution architects, engineering directors, 3D artists, and product users to figure out what was interfering. Five culprits emerged.

The offshore communication gap. Most Sri Lankan firms are service companies, not product companies. A solution architect at a firm serving Norwegian clients put it plainly: the project briefs and user flows arrive from the head office overseas, and "what we are doing in Sri Lanka is developing the given prototypes." The craftsmanship happens elsewhere. Local maturity can't shape a product it never gets to touch.

A designer-to-developer ratio of 1:36. One designer for every thirty-six developers. International practice is an order of magnitude better. At that ratio, UX becomes a garnish rather than an ingredient, whatever the org chart says.

Tier 2 work, not Tier 1. Borrowing Rasika Mahindasiri's framing: Tier 1 UX is research-led product ownership, meaning strategy, user research, information architecture. Tier 2 is visual design and UI execution of decisions made elsewhere. Sri Lankan teams overwhelmingly do Tier 2. You can have a very mature process for polishing pixels and it still won't move product performance.

Flat-screen habits don't survive the Z-axis. The 3D specialists I interviewed, veterans of local film and game productions, were blunt about this. The UX parameters we measure were built for flat screens and touch targets. XR ergonomics (depth, field of view, physical comfort) are a different discipline, and the maturity models don't capture it yet.

Other forces drive performance on their own. One engineering director argued that agile delivery practices may affect product performance more than UX maturity does in a services-dominated market. Project management, developer skill, and technical constraints all push on the outcome from outside my model. A 4.1% R² is pretty much what that situation looks like in the data.

Where that leaves us

Benchmarked against the Chapman & Plewes UX maturity model, Sri Lankan software organizations sit at Stage 2 of five. UX is acknowledged, applied sporadically, and structurally underpowered.

The honest conclusion of the dissertation has two sides. The mechanism works: maturity feeds practice, practice feeds performance, and both held up whenever I tested the paths in isolation. Investing in UXCM is not wasted money; it is the plumbing. But the context throttles it. Offshore briefs, a 1:36 ratio, Tier-2-only design work, and flat-screen thinking sever the last link in the chain before it reaches the user.

So my recommendations to industry leaders were correspondingly concrete:

1. Buy Tier 1, not more Tier 2. Hire and empower researchers and strategists, not only UI executors. And stop advertising "UX developer" roles. That title doesn't exist anywhere serious.
2. Fix the ratio. 1:36 is not a staffing detail. It's a structural announcement that UX doesn't matter.
3. Renegotiate the client relationship. Involve local design teams in defining user needs before requirements land in Colombo as finished prototypes. A collaborative discovery model beats a delivery pipe.
4. Bridge designers and developers internally. Several of the failures I traced weren't about skill. They were about the last translation step, from high-fidelity prototype to shipped code.
5. Treat maturity as a ladder, not a lever. The Chapman & Plewes stages can't be skipped. Set KPIs, measure UXCM continuously, and climb.

What I'd study next

I don't see the 4.1% R² as an embarrassment. It's an invitation. The obvious follow-ups: add agile practice, project management discipline (SQERT), and organizational communication as constructs; run the study longitudinally instead of cross-sectionally; extend it beyond Sri Lanka to other South Asian outsourcing markets; and build proper multi-item scales for the XR environmental factors I could only touch with single items.

The title of my closing slide was "Less is More." It started as a design principle. By the end of the research it had become an organizational one. Fewer handoffs. Fewer translation layers between the user and the people who understand them. Fewer developers per designer. The countries that lead in digital experience didn't get there by shipping more code; they got there by shortening the distance between maturity and the user.

Sri Lanka can too. But first we have to stop mistaking the paint for the architecture.

This post summarizes my MBA dissertation, "Establishing User Experience (UX) Design Practices: Antecedents of UX Maturity Towards User Centric Extended Reality (XR) Implementation in the Healthcare Industry," Department of Management of Technology, University of Moratuwa, 2023. Supervised by Prof. G. D. Samarasinghe and Dr. Chaman Wijesiriwardana.