Adaptive Path Blog

AIGA’s online business and design journal Gain features a weekly series of discussion summaries drawn from a mailing list. Last week’s discussion was on “Measuring for Managing Design”. I contributed to the mailing list thread, but I must say I found the discussion summary dissatisfying. Here’s what I wrote to the mailing list:

This was exactly the kind of situation that we at Adaptive Path attempted to address in our research on ROI, business value, and design. (Which lead to our report, “Leveraging Business Value: How ROI Changes User Experience.”)

Choosing the right things to measure can be tricky. I knew of a colleague whose performance was measured on the number of screens he produced. This of course incentivized exactly the wrong thing — more screens probably means worse design, not better.

In our work, we seek to find out what our clients really care about (in terms of numbers/metrics/value) and then demonstrate how design interventions can affect those numbers. I think this gets at your final question. You find out from the business what matters, and then figure out how your design work can influence what matters.

So, for example, we just completed some work for a financial services firm. Among the things that a financial services firm wants is to get customers to add more accounts. The financial services firm knows the value of those accounts to the business (usually measured in “lifetime customer value,” but also in a more straightforward understanding of “assets held.”) In our redesign of the site, we will be successful if more customers add more accounts than they currently do.

But, and I think this is crucial to this discussion, the value of measurement is often greater before the fact than after. With the financial services client, we came up with 9 types of measurements that design could possibly influence. Through some initial prioritization work, we were able to wheedle that down to 4 key measurements. Those 4 measurements became our focus — decisions about design were directly influenced by how it would affect these 4 key areas. That lead to a coherence in our design that would have been lost if we tried to address all possible measurements.

Another thing to consider is that design-by-measurement is great at optimizing current processes, and squeezing the most out of what you already have. It is not as successful for spurring disruptive innovations.

For me, the issue comes down to “What is good design?”, and I would argue that good design is design that has the desired impact. If designers aren’t willing to step up for such accountability, we will continue to be paper-hat-wearing order takers for other parts of the business.

This entry was posted on Sunday, May 7th, 2006 at 8:52 pm and is filed under Management, Product Management, ROI/Business Value. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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