How to Measure the Impact of Design
Can you define the value design is bringing to your business?
If you cannot you may be missing out on understanding a fundamental component of your business’ success. According to a 2013 study by the UK design council:
Design increases turnover: For every $1 invested in design, businesses can expect over $20 in increased revenues
Design is linked to profit: For every $1 invested in design, businesses can expect over $4 increase in net operating profit
Design boosts exports: For every $1 invested in design, businesses can expect a return of over $5 in increased exports
No matter your industry, this information is critical to take to heart. Because spending hundreds of your team’s hours and thousands of dollars on design should not be regarded as an expense, it needs to be approached as an investment.
Now, by looking at design through the lens of an investment you need to find a way to go beyond macro trends to measure the impact on your business. In this blog post I am going to share three categories by which you can quantify the return on your design decisions.
1. Time it takes to complete a task
Time is money and if you can reduce the amount of time it takes for a user to complete a task, you are reducing cost. Design decisions that can demonstrate a reduction in cost are always among the most impactful.
The step that comes after selecting a category is establishing a baseline set of data by which you can compare pre and post-design. A common example of this with internal software products involves taking the labor cost of your employee completing the task manually against executing it with the assistance of digital automation.
To quantify this you can breakdown your employee’s salary to their hourly wage to get a sense of the value of their time. You can use that value to compare how much more or less efficiently she completes the task with the newly designed system. To nail this down even further you will want to also take into account on-boarding and adjustment time to get a crystal clear picture of the efficiency gains.
2. Reducing Customer Support Costs
If your customer cannot complete a task on your application, she may need to call you or your support team. As we have previously ascertained, your time has a value on it, and your support team probably costs a pretty penny.
Nobody wants to be on the phone with support, not you or your customer. Through design you have the opportunity to save your customer the frustration by making the objective they want to achieve in your product as simple and straightforward as possible.
You can establish a baseline of customer support data by looking the amount of time you or your support team is spending handling customer issues and putting an hourly value on that time. After you implement the new design you can take the new data and compare it to your baseline to see how much time/money you saved.
3. Conversion
Conversion can mean a variety of things, in this sense I am describing the the main objective of your digital product. This can be an application sign up, daily active user rate, or an in-application purchase. Improving conversion percentage and engagement within your product are core tenants of design. If your designers don’t bring up what you want the software you’re paying for to DO, you should probably look elsewhere.
This metric is the most straightforward to measure in the short-term because it is inherently quantitative. The data you will be dealing with should involve split testing before and after the design change. These A/B tests should surround a measurable objective within you product, for something like Gmail if they were looking to redesign their email workflow they could A/B test the amount of emails sent with an older design and newer design.
In the long term, with product conversion and engagement metrics you need to quantify the value of your engaged user in order to analyze ROI. This can be accomplished with a customer lifetime value calculation and an analysis of your customer retention after sustained period following the design update.
As we all know, subjectivity is the ire of everyone making business decisions involving creative subject matter. However, in 2017 with digital experiences you can use the scientific method of hypothesizing and testing to determine the value of design. Use this power to collect simple quantitative measures of changes in the user experience as you make them to both justify and improve the value your product is providing to it’s users.
And hopefully by the end of that, design will help you make better business decisions that show up on your bottom line.
Helm Experience & Design is a digital product and UX focused studio proudly located in Buffalo, NY.
You can check out our work here and if you’d like to talk more about design, technology, or business just send us an email at team@helmux.com.
