User Experience Accountability: Assessing Your Impact on Business Results

by Scott Hirsch

November 13, 2003

So often, user-experience designers are held accountable for process objectives. A successful project is one that meets budgets, deadlines, and specifications.

There’s a problem with measuring success this way — process-objective metrics don’t really tell you how good you are at developing a strong user experience, only whether you completed the job specifications efficiently.

But what about the project itself? Was it chosen wisely? Was it grounded in user research and customer insight? What effect will it have on the business?

Measuring Project Success

We take for granted that good user experience design will help a business succeed. However, if there is a dissonance between business goals and project selection — as there often is — the Web team has little control over a project’s failure.

One solution to this problem is for user experience designers to take responsibility only for the business metrics that correspond to user experience. Ongoing development and analysis of these metrics will give you great insight into your customer and the health of your online experience.

At first, being held accountable for business success may sound scary — after all, aren’t marketers, senior managers, and financial analysts supposed to be dealing with “the numbers?”

This is a valid concern. Attempts to tie user experience to business goals won’t work if the metrics are inappropriate. For instance, we’ve seen Web teams held responsible for high-level metrics, like total online sales, though the Web team’s best efforts can’t change general market conditions. The business levers of price, promotion, and product design have a much greater influence on total sale.

To avoid this pitfall, user experience designers should have a voice in developing meaningful metrics for their contributions. In the example above, the metric was handed down from senior management, and the user experience experts were not involved in its selection.

Developing Applicable Metrics

If the designers had been at the table, they might have helped to brainstorm some lower-level metrics that contribute to total sales, but are more specific to the actual business strategies that designers control.

Here are just a few examples of user experience metrics that contribute to total sales:

• Sales conversion from the search function
• Cross-sell conversion that occurs online
• Increase in qualified business leads to the sales department
• Increase in percentage of applications or transactions completed
• Decrease in abandoned shopping carts

Specific financial accountability will make your team more productive and more confident about its business value. As teams track their impact on business metrics over time, a clearer picture of how user experience contributes to profitability will emerge. This will help to build credibility within your organization.

Determining Team Value

As your standing improves, you may be able to develop a methodology for calculating an actual return on investment (ROI). You can then use past development projects to value potential projects in the future.

In addition, by assigning business value to potential projects, your selection and approval process will be much better informed. Project approval will be less driven by personalities and intuitive beliefs, and more driven by hard data and anticipated returns.

Generally speaking, ROI is the language that financial analysts use to allocate investment dollars. Demonstrating the value of user experience in terms of ROI will increase your visibility and access to development resources at higher levels of the organization.

If you’re lucky enough to have an executive team that already intuitively understands the value of user experience investment, such a calculation will affirm their beliefs and focus their attention on needed improvements. Otherwise, an ROI of user experience can be a powerful tool to educate executives about the importance of this competitive advantage.

Contributing to Profits

Assigning financial accountability to user experience professionals will increase the field’s importance in business strategy. The discipline and related technologies are mature enough that their full business value can be realized. Appropriate accountability builds incentives and systems to calculate that value, as well as to focus work toward maximizing it.

Once our field begins to calculate direct financial repercussions of its work, business leaders will understand that good design is not just an art; it is also a science worthy of strategic attention and investment dollars.

Scott Hirsch is a consultant specializing in project finance and development processes.