While just about every design leader concedes that measuring Design’s impact is essential, few have figured out a reliable way of doing it. Quantifying the effect of Design is not an impossible challenge. It starts with five fundamental practices that design leaders should adopt:
1. Obsess about understanding your stakeholders
- Ask more questions and immerse yourself in what matters to the business — Design doesn’t own a revenue stream, so it should align with the metrics the company uses to measure success. To understand what those are, ask colleagues questions like: “What is your objective? Is it growth? Retaining customers? Reducing costs? Something else?” Then, ask how else the business measures success.
- Develop fluency in the language of business — Some designers fear asking business-related questions because they lack business savvy. Build the team’s confidence by teaching members about business vocabulary and performance.
- Apply your research methods to understand what drives value for the business — Design teams need to “remix their craft” by applying proven design methods to understanding not only customers but also colleagues.
- Understand stakeholders’ different cultural styles — Though stakeholders may share common goals for driving value for the business, the approaches they take to get their background shapes there. Designers who understand these cultural differences do better at working with and winning over their colleagues.
2. Focus first on goals, not metrics
- Answer the question, what are we trying to achieve here? — Engage with business and product partners to first identify the goals for their projects and initiatives.
- Then define metrics that will gauge whether you’ve achieved the goal — If the goal is to drive leads through the website, focus on how many visitors fill out the lead form. If it’s to reduce contact centre costs, focus on how many customers opt to self-serve via the website instead of calling in.
3. Know what makes a useful metric
- Meaningful — A useful metric is one that the business, not just the design team, actually cares about. Avoid metrics like “delight”, instead, favour metrics that have a broader appeal because they concretely answer the question, “Are we hitting our objectives?”
- Easy to understand — Look for useful metrics that someone in your organization is already measuring or for which data is readily available, like basic analytics, so they’re simple to access, monitor, and confidently speak to.
- Tethered to business outcomes — Executives will ignore you if your design metrics don’t connect to business metrics, so you’ll struggle to achieve the intended benefits.
4. Don’t go at it alone
- Learn from other disciplines — Measuring and communicating impact may be new territory for designers, but it’s a common practice in many different fields. Learn from those who have gone before you.
- Form partnerships with data scientists and finance pros — Connecting the data science and design worlds is critical for creating successful data-fueled products but also for successful design measurement.
5. Use your design superpowers to bring the numbers to life
- Use storytelling to communicate results — Create a story that is simple and powerful so stakeholders can spread it for you. How? Weave together the hard results (numbers) with the impact that they had on customers. Do this by translating metrics back into human impact. Instead of “churn rate,” for example, talk about how the company lost 352 customers last month. And bring the numbers to life!
- Bring results to life through perspective-shifting experiences — Go beyond just telling these stories: Show them immersively.
