Empowering Design Teams with Metrics
Product and design, and business and design, need to work closely together to achieve results. In fact, they work hand in hand on a daily basis. And sometimes that works well, at other times there can be an awful lot of tension in the relationship between the two. The business believes the proposed design or UX is not good, the design team thinks it is, who gets to make the call? I have heard of product managers or POs that would go into JIRA at night and switch out UX specs they didn’t like for UX specs they thought were the right ones (self made, of course). No joking, this happened in a company I worked in!
Can you make it measurable?
The problem at the heart of this conflict is that often discussions on design issues have a very subjective element, because it is very hard to measure “good design” and “good UX” in many cases. Yes, you can measure conversion funnels and bounce rates, but how do you measure “style”?
This became a real problem in one product I was running. We had lots of homework to do on usability and UX, and could do that with the usual analytics, but on the macro level I still felt the product simply did not “look and feel” good. It wasn’t beautiful. It looked outdated, it look “2005” instead of current. That was my opinion. But the design team were fully behind the design that was there, and discussions could quickly get emotional. And, of course they would, because telling a designer that their product doesn’t look good is like telling a PO that their business case makes no sense whatsoever. It will be perceived as a challenge of the most fundamental qualifications to do the job!
Looking for help I asked a friend who at that time I had adopted also as my coach for all things business. After some discussion of the issue, he asked: “is there any way you can make this measurable?”
Packaging aesthetics into measurable goals
With this idea I went to the design team lead and asked her opinion. And she thought there were ways to do it, and actually liked the idea. As we were anyways in the annual planning for the next year, we agreed to make and aesthetic metric one of her main goals. She worked with her team and proposed a set of user tests that could reliably benchmark products on an aesthetic level. The plan was to run 3 benchmark tests, one at the start of the year (which at that time was very soon), one mid year and one end of year. So one set of goals for her for the year was to (a) significantly improve our score on this metric, and (b) make us best in class compared to our main competitors.
So, off they went. They did the first test. And a key result was that while a lot of things in our product the users really liked, they did not like the overall style. It was too dark and too far away from the platform standards. This was exactly the debate we had had for years, but now, suddenly, instead of fighting back, the design team kicked into gear with all the energy they had. Within months we made enormous progress, and already at the mid year test were leading the benchmark, and continued to improve. At the same time, engagement in the design team was very high, satisfaction was high, and they felt real ownership of the new style. There was no “coaching” required, no discussions, no political manoeuvring to try and get to the result, things simply happened, and we all had a very successful year. I got the results I wanted (a highly competitive, best-in-class product), and the team could own the way to get there.
This is what makes metrics so important to use, including in the design domain.
Empowering industrial designers with metrics
In a second example I was working on a hardware product. In hardware products, the bill of materials, the BoM, is a constant headache for the product manager. It is always too high, and you need to push and pull all the time to get it to or below the target cost your product can have. If the BoM is too high, you don’t even need to start manufacturing, as it will fail in the market anyways: consumers will complain about the price, distributors will not list it, retailers not sell it, and hence it will not sell at lot. Here, it is also very easy to embark on an eternal collision course with the design team, who typically want everything a bit nicer, a bit more polished, a bit more unique. And this is exactly what happened. Our designer time and again came with this great idea, and that great material or finish, and we had to say: “sorry, it’s too expensive!”. After a couple of months of this jolly back-and-forth, I felt we needed to shift gear. And I came up with the idea to give him a “BoM budget”. From the overall BoM I broke out the cost I thought we would have left for case, the mechanical elements and CMF. Total BoM = electrical BoM + mechanical BoM, and the designer owned the mechanical BoM.
And the same magic happened again. Our designer got to work with his really unique level of energy, checking quotes on parts he proposed, he got on the phone with suppliers to understand how he needed to tweak his design idea to optimise for cost. And the results were astonishing. He was sometimes able to reduce the cost of parts by 20x, simply with some tweaks he had learned from the supplier. So, he could preserve his design vision and goal to create a beautiful product, while at the same time making sure the business case will work too. He was empowered to do his best work by the means of one very simple metric.
If you can’t agree, find a way to measure it
The bottom line is that metrics can be a hugely empowering tool for designers. So, if you are a product owner or business owner, and you want to empower your design team to do amazing work, think about setting goals as metrics. But equally, if you are a designer, and you feel you are stuck in subjective discussions with your PO or with your customer, and simply not empowered to do your best work: instead of fighting it out with the PO whether the button should be green or red, or the case should be anodized or not, think about “is there a smart metric I could agree with the business that I can achieve that will address the problem they are implicitly raising by criticising my design / rejecting my design ideas?”. Or, when you quote for a customer project: “Is there a way we could smartly measure the objective(s) they have when contracting us for this project?”. This will require a bit of empathy into what goals they might have, or what problems they want to solve. Unfortunately, many POs and business owners are not good at expressing their goals towards the design team in the right metrics. So you may need to help them into the game with some proposals. Or you simply ask: “how can we measure the problem you are raising or the results you want to achieve in a meaningful metric?”. The outcome of this discussion will very likely lead to better results for the business and a much more satisfying work experience for you!
