What Metric are you Designing to Improve Today?
Sometimes asking the simplest of questions changes everything. The other day I was talking with a designer about a home page redesign they were working on. They were talking about the aesthetics of the design, how the current version looked like junk and they wanted to make it beautiful.
A worthy goal, to be sure. The world needs more beauty. But then I asked: “what metric do you hope to improve with the redesign?” In other words, what specific change in the world are you addressing with this design? What isn’t happening right now that should be happening?
His answer was “I don’t know which metric. I just want us to not look so crappy”.
Now, this is a fine thing to want: looking better in public. But when I pushed further, asking for a concrete metric, he didn’t have an answer. So when I asked “How do you know when you’ve been successful?” he didn’t have an answer there, either. (to be fair, I was being pushy)
If there is one undercurrent of design these days it is this: design is becoming more strategic and thus more important to business success. With this power comes great responsibility. As designers we must be accountable for what we produce, and that means we must start aligning our work with concrete business metrics.
This doesn’t mean better or worse design (although I would hope it leads to better design). It just means that we have to set up a system whereby we can measure how well our design is doing. If it is leading to more sales (or some other important metric), then we’ve done a good job. If it leads to less sales, we better try something else.
In short, the answer “I want it to look better” won’t cut it going forward.
That’s not to say we couldn’t find a metric directly affected by aesthetics. It could be something like “Well, I want to improve brand recognition with our customers so they become more loyal”. We might measure this with a survey of user loyalty…distributing it before and after launch. Or it could also be something more concrete, like “I want to increase the number of people who contact us about working with them by improving our brand image”. This would be easy to measure: simply count the number of emails you get before and after launch.
Both of these are better answers, and both can be attached to concrete metrics. It’s not impossible to quantify people’s subjective reactions. That’s why surveys and interviews are being used more and more…they help you make sense of hard things like user happiness.
Though we often work in a field where opinion rules, the faster we can get to objective behavior the better it is for the health of design going forward. So, a fun thing to do when getting into work is to ask “What metric am I designing to improve today?”.
While aesthetics are subjective, behavior is not.
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1. lexx 8:34am, Wed 5th, 2009
I totally agree with the metrics approach. Apart from a great way to value the redesigns, it is a very honest and straightforward way to make business and prove that you redesign the flow and meaning (of the homepage for example) to something better. Not just the aesthetics.
2. Adrian Chan 1:10pm, Wed 5th, 2009
Josh
I might want to say “behavior is subjective, but it’s outcomes can be quantified” … but that’s just me splitting hairs.
Your point is even more important when it’s married to organizational goals, strategies, and tactics (traffic, clickthroughs, page views, SEO, etc). Site traffic and activity can be tracked and measured by tools and one’s design goals monitored for their success.
3. Tanner Christensen 12:02pm, Fri 7th, 2009
The key here is, as you stated, “How do you know when you’ve been successful [if you aren't designing to improve some metric]?”
How many businesses do you see everyday who revamp their website or advertisements or marketing materials (or a piece of one or all of them) without a clear metric for measuring the success of the change?
Unfortunately it seems that aesthetics are put before everything else in design education programs these days. It’s just another reason you need to write a few more books Joshua.
4. idont 8:19pm, Sun 9th, 2009
Hi Josh,
These examples are impossible to mesure in practice and they are more intended for the managment (useless?)….
(Eric Ries) Metrics must be “AAA”:
- Actionable
- Accessible
- Auditable
Something like:
- “We want to increase the percentage of people completing the subscription process in the sign up page.”
This is AAA. The present situation and the different solutions (with A/B split test) can be evaluated. And later, the performance can still be monitored.
Really good videos about metrics (From a “Facebook Garage”):
http://www.vimeo.com/user908262/videos/
Eric Ries’ one is really interesting.
http://www.slideshare.net/startuplessonslearned/eric-ries-engagement-loops-the-levers-and-metrics-of-engagement
5. Stephan Barrett 10:30pm, Sun 9th, 2009
Joshua, I totally agree with you here. I find many of the prospects we talk to redesign for the wrong reasons. To make matters worse, some businesses pick the agency they work with based on the wrong reasons, or choose how much they should spend before considering the value of the improvements being made.
Designing to improve metrics is the only thing that matters in our business.
6. Josh 4:44am, Mon 10th, 2009
@idont You make a good point. I didn’t phrase them in an actionable way.
7. Phil Buckley 2:22pm, Tue 11th, 2009
I hate to admit it, but I’m in the middle of a series of weekly meeting talking about a redesign strategy with no clear goal.
8. Gregor 4:19am, Wed 19th, 2009
Quite often people have an idea in their head of what metrics they want to improve but they aren’t aware that they’re actually addressing that metric.
So, saying that they don’t want to look so crappy might mean that they want to increase enquiries through the site but having a more professional image, even if they can’t explain that!
9. Louise 7:41am, Thu 27th, 2009
Thank you – this is an approach we’re trying to drive towards but it’s tough. The people around us are focused on content and think of design as aesthetics.
So we started with a general goal.
Site should serve new target audience better than it does now.
And then looked for some measures of that and some turned out to be remarkably simple.
- fewer visits to the sitemap
- fewer “lost” enquiries
- more traffic to the content designed for them
but it took a lot of discussion to get there.