Design KPI's: Central to UX Strategy

One of the first steps in a UX/product design strategy program should be alignment of design goals to business goals. Although not all businesses have a clear vision and North Star to align design to, most have a business model that can be either explicitly or implicitly determined. Designers and researchers who want to help guide the strategy of a product or service need to understand exactly how the business makes money; what the difference is between a good year and a great year in terms of financial results; and what the customer experience levers are for moving the needle.

WHERE TO FIND BUSINESS KPI'S

For publicly owned companies, current extensive documentation about the business is readily available, e.g. annual reports, quarterly earnings calls, etc. Combing through this content for the primary business success variables may be time-consuming, but well worth the effort for design or research professionals who want to be involved in strategy. If you are internal to the company you are serving, you may have access to other kinds of reports that reveal not only how the business makes money, but also what the current priorities and most important factors are.

From the resources listed above, you can either directly or indirectly determine what the Business Key Performance Indicators (KPI's) are, and get an idea of their order of importance or and current priority. From this information, you can create a list of the top 5 or 10 Business KPI's.

CREATING DESIGN KPI'S THAT ALIGN TO BUSINESS KPI'S

Now comes the tricky part: Create Design KPI's that align to the Business KPI's so that design success is tied directly to business success.

According to Avinash Kaushik of Google, KPI's should have 4 attributes:

1. Un-Complex

2. Relevant

3. Timely

4. Instantly Interpreted

Some points Daniel suggests to keep in mind:

·?????Attention spans are short, so people shouldn’t have to work hard to understand the KPI's

·?????Each company has unique goals, and therefore have a unique set of Design KPIs

·?????KPI's are useless unless decision makers can use them to make timely decisions that matter

There are lots of generic Design KPI's floating around that are a good starting point, but which need to be tweaked or modified to reflect the specific goals of your business. Examples of generic Design KPI's include:

·?????Task success rate

·?????Time on task

·?????Use of search vs. navigation

·?????User error rate

·?????Usability heuristics

·?????Reported expectations vs. performance

·?????Overall satisfaction

LEARN MORE ABOUT CREATING DESIGN KPI'S

Alignment to the business and creation of Design KPI's are two core topics of the UX Strategy Workshop (https://bit.ly/3GSOcrW ) I will be teaching this year in UX hub cities in the USA, Europe and Asia. This is a newly revised workshop that has been hosted on-site in the past by Netflix, Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, Booking.com, Microsoft, IBM and many other industry-leading companies. If your company is located centrally in a tech hub city (SF, LA, Austin, Boston, NYC, Amsterdam, Berlin, Munich, Stockholm, Paris, Barcelona, Singapore, Tokyo, Shanghai, etc.) and is interested in hosting local design and product professionals in-house for the workshop, contact me !