Setting up key performance metrics for UX design team
Big data recently has becomes mainstream on how we make design decisions for users. How we use data became more critical than ever in design field especially when a design team sits at executive table and need to influence business decisions.
Many UX design teams have been confused when they are asked to set their seasonly or annually KPI. The reason that why many design leaders got frustrated because as a functional team, they often expect immediately impact on business through design disciplines as they have be told a fairytale of UXD or just simply been measured with the same way of business entities inside company.
In fact, business end-results are often not a great measurement for a design team. we shouldn’t directly measure how much money we help company to make? what are the product satisfaction from customers? even what’s daily active users numbers? these outcome could have been influenced by too many factors. for instance, is retention rate a behavior index to measure for design? I believe the answer is “No”. At least it’s not a good index in most cases. if we use the retention rate as KPI for design team, we often end up debating is it marketing, design, or product contribution giving this result?
I am not saying that the end-results such as Gross merchandise volume, Daily Active Users, Member numbers even NPS cannot be Design teams’ goals. Unfortunately these are just not fair indicators to a design team. somehow these indicators just too much for a design team to bear when they can be influenced by many functional factors.
So how do we set up KPIs as a UX design function? I suggest to look at the basis. Why we design is to influence users’ minds and behaviors. Of course we need to seek the linkage of these behaviors and business goal. but for UX teams, we should narrow down design goals simply those elements can immediately trigger these changes. We should measure progressive indicators such as how much cost or resources we save when we choose a right material on a product? how many tasks we reduced for users to buy a car on a trading app? how many song plays we generate by putting a button on a music player?
Why it is called progressive indicators because there are end results link to them. Although we don’t set up the business end results as KPIs, but those progressive indicators still need to be rational especially they need to be indirectly support end-results. A quick example, 1% D.A.U increase can be generated by 5,000 user activities a day. users’ activities includes browsing, purchasing items as well as liking and commenting. if our business goal is to increase 1% of D.A.U, there are so many ways including advertising, campaigning, etc. but for design team we can judge by design an attractive like button or interesting interaction to let users click on “like” button more or make writing a comment easy and awardable. These behaviors indicators still link to business goals but can be purified to only measuring design effect.
