Bhuvan Saini

Imagine that you’ve just received an invite to a new meeting. The description is a bit vague, but the title is sitting right there, with its heavy weight, making you a bit worried: design KPIs. Now, what do you think the meeting is going to be about?

It wouldn’t be surprising to hear about conversion rates, new A/B testing results, bounce rates, perhaps exit pages, SERPs, and funnel drops. We might anticipate Google Analytics data and a report on generated leads.

What we expect to see are data points scattered across charts. Each of the data points represents a unique experience, and when put together, they represent the average behaviour of our products. Of course, the average user doesn’t exist, but the data helps us identify trends and changes over time. These trends are indeed valuable insights. But they are also only one part of the full story.

Over the decades, we’ve become remarkably good at digital design. We’ve learned how to craft truly beautiful interfaces and well-orchestrated interactions. And we’ve also learned how to encourage action to meet a project’s requirements and drive business metrics. In fact, we can make pretty much anything work.

Design KPIs

How can we speak objectively about a particular design? It appears to be such a subjective thing, with plenty of personal opinions and individual experiences that flow into every individual design process. Yet ultimately design solves problems, and we surely should be able to measure how well a particular problem is being solved.

In fact, just like we define performance KPIs or business KPIs, we can also establish design KPIs and track their performance over time. Design KPIs are key attributes that capture customers’ experiences for top tasks that users frequently perform in a product.

Recently, I’ve started setting up dashboards of design KPIs in the organisations that I work with. Together, we decide on key attributes that are important to provide a better UX, and then we track them repeatedly over time, very much like we would track other metrics in the organization.

One thing that I learned quickly is that these metrics can’t exist in isolation; they need to be connected with the business goals, e.g., describe the accuracy of submitted data, the quality of leads, or the error recovery rate. While organisations often focus on end goals alone (leads, for example), we try to discover all the key attributes that contribute to reaching these end goals. These, in fact, are design KPIs.

There are, as it turns out, plenty of helpful design KPIs, but these are the ones that usually deserve special attention:

• top task completion rates,
• top task completion times,
• accuracy of data submitted by users,
• ratio of content to navigation (mobile/desktop),
  error frequency,
• error recovery rate (quality of error messages),
• quality of leads,
• time to publish,
• time to release,
• time to make your first purchase,
• time to upgrade,
• conversion rate,
• carbon footprint impact,
• System Usability Scale Score (ideally over 75),
• accessibility score,
• performance score.

Obviously, every organisation will have its own set of design KPIs. To establish them, we need to understand what attributes have an impact on business goals. One strategy that seemed to be working for me is to explore the pain points and slowdowns that the organisation is aware of. This usually requires a few rounds of interviews, starting with those with customer support and service desks and ending with those with design and engineering teams.

The metrics listed above are much more focused on the actual user experience and user behavior than on ambiguous data points in analytics that represent average behavior. Of course, we also need to keep track of these KPIs as time goes on. and this requires measurements.

Design Key Performance Indicators

Once we have defined the KPIs, how do we measure them? We can rely on Gerry McGovern’s Top Tasks approach to identify the most frequent tasks that users complete in a product. We conduct research to discover the most important tasks. We study search queries and server logs, run user interviews, and hold workshops with stakeholders.

Once we have that list, we bring users in to vote on the tasks that they consider important. Then we write down task instructions for each top task. These instructions will be handed to users in usability tests to validate that they can actually complete these tasks successfully. Usually, you don't need more than 20–30 people to participate in each test.

Finally, every 8-12 weeks, we run tests with the same task instructions on the same segments of users.Based on these tests, we measure and plot success rates and completion times over time. As long as we improve our design KPIs, we should be on the right path. And we have data to prove it!

Design KPIs help us stay on track by driving metrics that actually matter. With them, we can gradually improve UX over time and gain evidence that our design decisions are actually effective in practice.

Final Thoughts

It’s worth noting that the definition of design KPIs should have a significant impact on how the quality of work is measured. Rather than focusing solely on the number of produced pages or websites, bounce rates, or click rates, we should strive to create quality content that is useful to those who consume it.

Next time you are working on a project, consider establishing design KPIs alongside business KPIs and creating a more holistic and healthy mix of metrics that capture user experience and business goals. In the end, both sides will only benefit from a sustainable and effective strategy that keeps users and business stakeholders happy.