Great UX goes unnoticed simply because we don’t speak the language of business. Time to turn intuition into measurable value
How To Measure And Show UX Impact. With practical guidelines on how to track and articulate business impact of design work ↓
To visualize UX impact, we often use design KPI trees or design KPI graphs (see above). Both are different ways to visualize how design initiatives help reach business goals, and show the dependencies between them.
🚫 Business rarely sees the value of UX the way designers do.
✅ To many, it shows up merely in good outcomes of A/B tests.
✅ To some, it’s reflected in satisfaction surveys (NPS, CSAT).
🤔 But most UX work goes unnoticed, and so does its impact.
✅ To change that, we can measure and report design success.
✅ Identify 10–12 representative tasks that users must do well.
✅ These tasks must reflect business priorities, get signed off.
✅ Your goal is to achieve 80%+ success rate for these tasks.
✅ Focus on task success rate and task completion times.
✅ You need before/after snapshots to explain your UX impact.
✅ Choose metrics to track impact of your UX changes.
↳ Global KPIs: success for key tasks in a customer journey.
↳ Local KPIs: success for key tasks in a single touchpoint.
🤔 Explain and report your impact with KPI trees/graphs.
✅ Show how your design KPIs reinforce business flywheels.
UX work often appears to be disconnected from the heart of the business. As we tirelessly iterate on flows and features, it’s often very hard to make an argument that a design change that we’ve made recently had a profound impact on key business metrics.
The reason for that is that, unlike other departments, we rarely have a set of widely established and regularly reported design KPIs. These KPIs are UX metrics that are tied to business metrics that they are impacting.
Design KPIs
Design KPI Trees
How To Measure UX and Design Impact, by yours truly
Design KPI Graphs, by Ryan Rumsey
Business flywheels, by Timothy T Tiryaki, PhD
Another way is to show UX impact within business flywheels — an artefact companies use to explain their business models. Basically they are self-reinforcing cycles of business growth, and design work typically enables these cycles to function. Study where exactly your work fits in those flywheels and attach design KPIs to them to reinforce the value that UX is driving.
Surely not all design work is impactful. It depends on the audience it addresses and the value it delivers. But by measuring what matters, we can get a trackable record of the changes we enable over time — and once you shed light on it, it might change how your work is seen much faster than you think
Resources
A few useful resources on UX metrics and Design KPIs to get started:
Design KPI Tree (an example)
How To Measure UX, by Roman Videnov
Business Thinking for Designers (free eBook), by Ryan Rumsey
Doubleloop KPI Trees and Value Architecture, by Daniel Schmidt
Measuring Experiences, Not Product Use, by Jared Spool
All UX Metrics In One Place, by Alex Szczurek
How To Measure UX and Design Impact (video course)