SMART Goal Writing for UX Professionals

Career goals are a critical part of many businesses, but more importantly, critical for growth in your career. They help to outline what you can do to become noticed and respected in your organization. They assist with carving out the path for growth in your career. Without them, it can be easy to simply go through the motions and feel ‘stuck’.

Goals are great and helpful, but we are not trained on them in school, or more often, in the companies, we work for. I see a lot of struggle across designers, even fairly seasoned ones, writing clear and concise goals. Over the years, here are the hurdles I’ve overcome or helped others to see clearly.

Before we dive in, I find that the SMART goal template is the best way to craft goals. There is no need to recreate the wheel here. Make your goals specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-based. The framework is great but can be hard to get a handle on in a creative career.

“What I do isn’t really measurable”

Everything is measurable, maybe just not in the traditional way. Let’s take an example of creating a specific feature within a product, such as adding a calculator to a grocery app. While our design work may be completed within a specific timeframe, the development work may not be completed until outside of that time. You won’t be able to tell immediately what impact your design has on users. Therefore, a measurement for the goal that is focused on end-user engagement outside of the timeframe may not work. Instead, we can look at other impacts.

How could this affect the process or other teams?

Example: Integrating multiple check-ins with the engineering team during the iteration stage will result in a decrease in time for design approval and design reviews. During the timeframe of developing the feature, measure the time spent in additional check-ins and the timeframe for approval. When compared to another feature developed, has this increase in participation resulted in the approval process being completed in a smaller timeframe?

How will this feature impact the organization?

In many cases, you can speak directly to addressing the needs of certain customers in goals, even if it is not immediately measurable. Binary measurements are valid, and ‘yes, this addresses the specific needed as requested by customer XYZ’ is a measurement.

How will this feature impact me?

Working on a complex feature could introduce you to new teammates or entire teams in your organization, so a potential measurement could be focused on how many new team members with whom you interacted.

“I’m a creative, I don’t do business value”

It’s true — as a creative major, most of our college experience fails to give us the key ways our designs impact the businesses we work for. When placed in a real-world setting, we are expected to be able to show the business value design gives, not only the user experience improvement.

Finding and applying business value will most likely involve getting input from business analysts, project managers, program managers, and other business-focused colleagues who are already familiar with this kind of metric. Getting support from others is essential to finding the true value for a business.

When trying to showcase a design’s value, look at internal process improvements that save time and money, key performance indicators that affect customer retention, and features that provide a potential for revenue growth. Internal process improvements are one of the easiest ways to get started in placing business value into your goals as they are easiest to measure yourself. For example, if you look at improving the template that designers utilize to start designs, you can measure the average setup time before and after the process improvement to show the value. A decrease in 1 hour of time can be multiplied by the average cost of a designer’s time and the average projects worked on a year. Let’s say you have 2 designers that cost the business around $100 an hour and work on 20 projects a year. A process that reduces time on a project by around one hour has a $2,000 impact. In larger organizations, these time reductions can be incredibly impactful.

Often business value is a higher-theme that may take years to truly achieve. Breaking it down into bits that aim at the larger goal is the smart way to chip away at a large goal. Not everything can be measured as successful in a few months or even a year.

“I don’t like writing a lot of what I’m not good at”

Personally, I never focus on things I am not good at or don’t like. It’s important to focus on things you are passionate about — it’s part of the ‘attainable’ portion of the SMART framework. ‘Is it something I can do’ translates into ‘is it something I am willing to do?’

Try to look into things you already enjoy and figure out how you can do more of those things. Do you like talking to people? A goal could be to focus on improving team morale by scheduling coffee dates with random groups. Do you like organized files? Maybe you can improve key files that your team utilizes often, such as ‘master’ Sketch files for a product or library files.

“Goals take away from doing my job”

Be efficient and figure out how you can make the basic ‘get my job done goals’ into more.

For example, if I am designing a feature and making multiple screens, I know I can improve a screen in our team’s master sketch files with correct layer naming and updates to use our design system. It makes my design easier to create and update. Sure, it takes an extra 15–30 minutes in set-up, but it also saves me time as I make edits so it’s accounted for. With that, I’ve created a goal to update a specific amount of our team's files by doing the work I already need to do. Do less work, make life easier, make yourself look good.

“No one looks at my goals, so why am I doing this?”

This may be true, other than your manager. Why not make your goals something others will notice? If you write your goals well, other people will notice you are doing things. They will likely have no idea they are your professional or business goals, but you’ll make a difference. That’s what goals are really about: making a difference.

“This is just me writing about doing my job…”

Correct! Essentially, you are writing what your role is and tying it to specific items. It’s a plan. For those of you out there who aren’t planners, it can be difficult to tackle these at first. But at their core, goals are really just an outline ‘of how I’m going to do my job really well and impact our business.’ When you make impactful goals, it can give you a larger sense of pride in your career as well as carve out a clearer path to larger opportunities in the future.