Set meaningful design metrics that make you uncomfortable so you can achieve more.
First of all, if you’re not familiar with design metrics, you can search HEART framework. HEART – Happiness, Engagement, Adoption, Retention and Task Success. It’s a way to measure the success of your design. “Why do I need to measure,” you might ask. You need to have some kind of measurement so you can improve, but be careful about picking the right metrics and also your intention in measuring the metrics. For example you’re designing a food delivery service. You pick Monthly Active Users (MAU) as one of the metrics to measure the success. You’re aiming 100k MAU by end of the year. You define someone as Monthly Active User if he/she opens the app, regardless of what he/she does after that. You might argue that the growth stage of your product is currently at the acquisition stage, so having MAU defined as people who open the app makes sense. You feel comfortable with that definition, but that metric is meaningless. It doesn’t help you to improve any of your features. It doesn’t help you to improve the experience of your users. It doesn’t help the business to grow significantly.
Imagine if you set a metric like this: an average of 5 food orders/week per user. If you have this kind of metric, you’ll measure the conversion to food order. When you see a big drop off at particular moment, you’ll find ways to improve that experience. You’ll do research to find out what makes people order food, or why they don’t. Armed with the insights and a clear goal, you’ll run design sprint to explore design solutions. When it’s time to build the solution, you have the best design at this point, to aim for that 5 food orders/week per user. What do you think if you only have MAU – as people who only open the app, as your metric? I could think of many sneaky dark UX patterns to drive users to just open the app without doing nothing.
The metrics needs to be meaningful, and also makes you uncomfortable: At first, I was gonna put 3 food orders as an example, I’m comfortable with that. But then, nothing good is ever easy. The metric should be a stretch goal, something that makes you uncomfortable. So I put 5. Challenging goal is fascinating. It makes the work more exciting and drives people to push themselves. You and the team are better than you think you are, and you can achieve more.
