Shifting Our Team Goals to be UX Outcomes

Read the article published on articles.uie.com.

It’s common, when the new year rolls around, for teams to think about their goals. What can we hope to accomplish over the next year that will show growth and improvement over the previous year’s efforts?

There are several ways to come up with goals. For example, the leadership of a UX team might pick goals for increasing what their team accomplished during the previous year. They could count their team’s activities, such as the usability tests they conducted or wireframes they delivered. Their new 12-month goal would be to accomplish more of those activities.

However, when a team measures their goals using activities, they are focusing on the outputs of UX research and design efforts. Outputs are necessary, but they are not the end of the game.

Shifting to outcomes instead of outputs

We’ve found that more experienced UX teams steer clear of outputs, instead of focusing on outcomes. While outputs represent the effort and activities of the team’s work, outcomes represent the results they achieved because of that work.

Many teams start their shift to outcomes with business outcomes. How will their UX work improve the business? Could their designs increase new subscriptions or…