Quantifying the Value of Design

Hey there! 👋

Yes, I’m 1 cycle late. However, it was due to some re-writes in this, that led to my discovery that I might not have been very clear with my explanations, so I made some adjustments to include some diagrams for clarity.

In my previous newsletter, I mentioned about how difficult it is to quantify the value of design. It is one of the biggest struggles that I see designers trying to achieve. One of the arguments that I’ve heard from someone who dismisses UX was that people will jump hurdles of bad experiences to get to a good price for a product or service. That’s not wrong. However, that’s also not the full picture. The type of customer that goes through hurdles to chase cheap prices speaks volumes of what type of customer they are. I had to explain it in a way that he could understand, so I reframed my argument to fit his perspective and his business goals.

What I found out through the course of my entire career is that perspectives are always relevant in our daily lives. When someone doesn’t understand the things that we say, we put it in perspective for them. This is pretty much the same for everything else—and how we quantify value of design or user experience. This might be a longer post than usual so sit tight—there’s going to be a lot of information to process.

Unfortunately not all companies are like Apple, a design-led organisation. The power of design that they harness, goes beyond user experience. They understand the fundamentals of a well-designed ecosystem and how to emotionally connect users to their brand—and making customers spend more than intended.

For most of us, our day to day struggles are presenting measurements like ‘System Usability Scale’ or ‘Net Promoter Score’ to our stakeholders, who don’t see the co-relation between these data and how it could help them understand risks and opportunities, then making informed business decisions. So how might we actually do that?

The Balanced Scorecard

Popularised by Robert S. Kaplan and David P. Norton, this revolutionised conventional thinking about performance metrics in the 90s. The balanced scorecard helps to give perspectives to key areas of the business, mainly:

• Financial Perspectives

• Customer Perspectives

• Business Process Perspectives

• Growth & Innovation Perspectives

Within these perspectives, there are a small number of strategic objectives, where there are performance measures that could help us understand easily and act upon quickly. I map my design measurements to a modified version of the balanced scorecard. This gives perspective of the design that you’re mapping the measurements to.

Use Existing Categories for Objectives

Within your own organisation, the teams that you work with should have categories of performance measures that they adhere to. For example, technology and engineering teams should have technical performance measures to mitigate risks and errors. When you modify the balanced scorecard to reflect the categories of which existing teams use, you have a better way of presenting it to them in a way that they can understand. So if you are building apps internally, you might find that you need to measure different performances with other considerations as well.

• Business Performance (Usability) - Performing essential tasks

  • Business goals (Task creation, review, search, completion)

  • Environments (Physical, social conditions)

• Technical Performance (Functionality) - Giving information and mitigating errors

  • Measured by Time on task ( Ease of task completion, task progression, unexpected workflows, etc)

  • Supporting tech (Hardware, software)

• Adoption Performance (Credibility) - Trust, Brand

  • Measured by usage over time

Design sits within all these, which means you are essentially embedding design within the organisation. Some of these are linked to business processes, which means that if you face blockers, you might need to redesign or relook at these processes.

Reflect: The key here is that you are NOT creating new ways to measure, but instead creating an effective communication method to these stakeholders within those areas of perspectives.

Mentor’s Notes

There was an article which I read years ago that helped me shape the way I measure things today. I can’t seem to find that article but it was a fantastic read. I adopted the way things could be measured and presented better as I built more enterprise apps within the organisation.

It changed the way I fundamentally thought about measuring design. Back up 15 years ago, I knew that perspectives and circumstances matter, but it didn’t occur to me that it also impacted things like unconscious biases, on top of the stuff I covered today.

Did this help? Was this clear enough to understand? Or did I make things more complicated than needed? Hit reply and let me know! :)

P.S. Yes, as always, please share it with your friends if you think it’s useful.