Design Management and Metrics: Communicating Design Impact

How to articulate what benefits a design may have for the user or company.

Designers should communicate the value of their design to stakeholders. This is not always easy because it can be hard to see the design’s value from an outsider’s perspective.

The best way to do this is by providing them with a clear understanding of what problems the design solves and how it solves them. This will help stakeholders understand why they should get on board with your design.

Measure & Communicate Design Impact

Here’s a hypothetical scenario, you want to re-design an existing product because you have some hypothesis of design impact and improvement. Or, you want to create an illustration library that will help the design process further down the line. To convince non-design centric managers of the value of the efforts, we tie our hypothesis to detailed granular metrics which then tie to the organisation’s north star metric.

I like to segment the cascading metrics into three parts:

• Google’s HEART Framework
  You can replace this with any other framework of your liking.
• Other UX KPI’s
  This would be any metrics that don’t directly tie into your framework of choosing but still contribute to the north star metrics. You can also bring in other attributes not accounted for in your framework, such as Referral in my case where I use the HEART framework.
• Creative KPI’s
  This is different in that, these metrics may not directly tie into a product or service, but rather other factors such as operational efficiency which contributed to the success of the product or service.

Photo by Zainul Yasni on Unsplash

In some circumstances, we might have to deal with ambiguity. I believe that designers do well to empathise and make educated assumptions (in collaboration with other team members) to plan future endeavours.

Further Reading:

• Made to measure: Getting design leadership metrics right | McKinsey
• 10 frameworks to help you measure success in design | by Kaiting Huang | UX Collective (uxdesign.cc)
• The 7 most important UX KPIs and how to measure them — TestingTime
• Graphic Designer KPIs: Metrics for a Creative Team (bscdesigner.com)