7 Best Practices for Communicating the Value of Design Through Metrics

You gotta have metrics to bring to the table with non-designers.

That was the big takeaway from a recent Fireside Chat I hosted on how to best communicate the value of design. Leanne Waldal, research leader at Dropbox, Autodesk and more, plus Kerry Rodden, co-creator of Google’s HEART framework, joined me to talk through the challenges of making sure design gets the respect it deserves within an organization.

From that conversation I published a short primer on the HEART framework, including links to other frameworks for measuring user experience.

But in this post I want to share some of the best practices Leanne and Kerry recommended to overcome the misconception that design is overly qualitative, or “squishy.”

#1: Have Empathy for Your Colleagues

Kerry suggested thinking of your non-designer colleagues as users of your work and extending them empathy just as you would users of any other product.

“Understanding the constraints the product people are under, the engineering people are under — and being able to speak their language a little bit — I think is really, really helpful when it comes to then having the value of your work be understood,” she said. “Because then it’s clear that you’ve made the effort to understand the value of theirs.”

Leanne echoed this sentiment and added that a quick way to raise the estimation of design in the eyes of a project manager is to step back and consider what you can measure on their behalf to help ensure there aren’t any surprises after a launch. “Any PM who’s been around for a while has had the unfortunate experience of launching something and having some major thing blow up in their face,” she said.

#2: Embrace Evaluation of Your Work

Applying metrics to your design work ultimately means opening the door to critique. This takes a certain courage, especially because we know metrics aren’t perfect. But both Kerry and Leanne urged designers to embrace evaluation as a learning opportunity.

“Sometimes it’s hard to be open to that idea, to being evaluated,” Kerry said. “But if you can embrace it and treat it as an opportunity to learn something, then I think that’s another way to help bridge that gap with product and engineering and marketing, and so on.”

Embracing quantitative evaluation from a broader perspective can also improve a design team’s knowledge of the business, Leanne explained. “It up-levels the design team’s understanding of the business and strategy and goals and being aligned with it,” she said. ”That gives you a bigger voice in your company when you care about the business.”

#3: Measure What Matters to the Business

There’s almost no limit to the things we could measure. But if you want to prove the value of design to your organization, make sure you’re measuring the things that affect the goals and priorities of your leadership and colleagues.

What KPIs, KRs or OKRs are your business focused on? Leanne suggests using these as guideposts for deciding what design metrics you should track and communicate. “It’s the difference between 20 or 30 years ago when we had very little data to look at or make decisions on,” she said. “Now we have so much that we don’t know how to pick what to do with it.”

If you’re still not sure where to begin, she recommended benchmarking an aspect of your user experience against that of a competitor’s product. Non-designers are often used to analyzing a competitor’s feature set, so this kind of comparison is a particularly good way to point to the competitive advantage of a well-designed user experience.

#4: Start with a Solid Baseline

If you’re just getting underway with measuring user experience, consider starting with a redesign project — even if it’s small.

With a redesign, you should have plenty of baseline data from before the change that you can compare against. If the redesign is successful, you’ll start to see some good deltas in the metrics that will be easy to communicate out.

This was the approach they took at Google, and it afforded Kerry’s team opportunities to create good case studies that clearly demonstrated the value of sound design decisions. “Ideally, people are going to see what you’ve done and want to do it themselves,” she said. “If you can just organically get it going within the company in little pockets, that often is the best way to institute change.”

#5: Involve Collaborators in Your Research

One thing I hear from a lot of designers is that they have difficulty getting their organizations to pull back from a focus on features and concentrate instead on the flow of the user experience.

According to Leanne, the best way to widen people’s perspectives is to invite them into your observational research. Invite them to come with you into the field or the lab. Have them participate in some remote interviews or work with you to evaluate user surveys.

“There’s nothing like sitting with someone and watching them have trouble, or watching them be delighted, and then seeing what else they do around that,” Leanne said. “Seeing the whole picture of somebody’s experience starts changing the conversation for the people who are so focused on features.”

Kerry added that this big-picture approach can be mirrored in your analytics as well. Instead of measuring aspects of individual features, measure how a change to a feature or other item affects the flow of users through the product. How does it change the steps or order in which they do things? That will help shift the thinking away from individual features.

#6: Package Your Insights to Sell

During the Fireside Chat, we got a question from an attendee who asked for advice on what to do if executives aren’t paying attention to your metrics.

The answer we landed on is to give more attention to how’re you’re presenting it. As mentioned above, it’s important to know what leadership cares about, but it goes beyond that. What format is going to land best with them?

It may take some experimenting to determine the right format. Heidi Munc, who leads user experience design for Nationwide, told me earlier this year her team found success when they started printing what is essentially a coffee table book that executives can page through during lunch. Facebook designers, on the other hand, use lots of short video documentaries. But for you, it might be as simple as making the right choice between a deck or a spreadsheet.

“What you’re trying to do is sell your product,” Leanne explained. “And just like any salesperson knows, in order to sell your product, you have to know what people are drawn to.”

#7: Correlate Quantitative and Qualitative Data

I saved this one for last, because it’s next-level stuff.

In short, when you reach ninja-like mastery of your metrics, you’ll be able to explain to your colleagues how you infer the user’s state of mind from particular data points. But to reach this level, Leanne insists it will take lots of back and forth between qualitative and quantitative research while closely monitoring user analytics.

“We could iterate back and forth and eventually come to an algorithm that we could implement in the data that said, ‘Now, if you do this, this, and these things, we know based on the research we’re doing, that you are satisfied or you are happy,’” she said.

She also stressed that you’ve got to earn it. Her team went deep into the research, because they didn’t trust the conclusions others were drawing from disparate data. “We got there from the start of having people tell us that if you were eating apples and bananas, then you were happy, but if you were eating papayas, you were sad. We were like, ‘How do you know that just from looking at the data?’”

Kerry’s Bonus Zen Tip: Numbers Aren’t Everything

You don’t always have to be able to express the value of your work in numbers, Kerry said.

She made the point that it’s important to be able to articulate other changes you’ve helped bring about in the organization — even if just for yourself..

“I think just keeping your mind aware of what are the possible impacts of the work because, of course, that’s something that’s satisfying as a person,” she said. “I find that helpful to just be aware of what are the different ways that you can have an impact even if it’s not something necessarily noble or something that makes sense to try and count.”

If you’re looking for additional information on communicating the value of design, check out the numerous resources at DesignBetter.com, especially this podcast with Abigail Hart Gray, director of UX at Google.