March 29, 2021 - Led by Jared Spool

Avoid the trap of measuring outputs when it’s outcomes you need to achieve.

When teams start their journey to measure their user experience, they almost always start by measuring the outputs. How many clicks? Are users “engaging” (whatever that means)? Are they completing more task flows? These questions don’t tell us if we’ve made the experience better, only if we made it more.

When we focus on outputs, we entirely miss what we want to measure in the first place: Are we actually improving our product or service’s experience for our users? This is where UX outcomes come into play.

You’ll learn how to create effective UX Outcomes so that…

• Your team and stakeholders have a clear understanding of how everyone’s work is improving people’s lives.
• You get everyone on the same page about what great UX looks like.
• You can show how the next release’s features play a critical role in your long-term UX vision.

Notes for today's discussion:

Part 1: Persuasive UX Metrics tell the story of how our UX Strategy is doing

Every department or division in an organization has strategies.

Sales, marketing, product, support, finance, HR, engineering/IT all have their own strategies.

There's a sales strategy, a marketing strategy, and a product strategy.

Each strategy rallies all of the resources, experience, knowledge, people, tools, skills, and capability of that department to contribute to the organization achieving its goals.

For example, the sales team is currently working to rally all of the sales resources, experiences, knowledge, people, tools, skills, and capability that exists in the organization to achieve the organization's goals.

The sales team management measures how well the sales team is doing.

Usually, the ultimate metric is the dollar amount of closed sales.

The higher this number grows, the better the sales team is doing.

They may also track other related measurements.

• How many customers have they contacted?
  • How many of those customers are from new sales leads?
• How many customers have shown interest in purchasing the product or service?
• How many customers have started the sales process?
• How many orders have been booked (but not yet closed)?
  • How much are the booked sales worth?
  • How long does it take the sales team to close a deal?

While all these metrics are interesting and show the progress of the team, only closed sales truly help the organization achieve its goals.

Closed sales is a success metric.

The other metrics are progress metrics.

Metrics are a tool of the executive leadership team to dive into what's important.

They look at where the numbers are today.

And where they want them to be.

They dive into the numbers that:

• Are the most meaningful to the organization.
• Have the biggest gaps between where they are and where they should be.

Compared to other parts of the organization, UX is immature practice.

Sales, marketing, finance, and HR have been around a lot longer.

They've learned what the executive leadership needs to see the progress their teams are making.

And to highlight the critical priorities for attention and investment.

As leaders in the immature UX practice, we don't have these numbers easily available.

We need to use our UX skills to design and implement the right numbers to tell our stories of success and progress.