Lead Your UX Team With a Measure of Success

A strange irony about digital design is that ultimately it’s neither about the digits nor the design. It’s about communication between people, like helping users to use a tool, explaining a product’s benefits, educating curious readers about a topic or expounding upon one’s opinion. In every case, design should support goals that benefit the site’s owner, the end user, or preferably both.

In this post we’ll look at four steps to keeping your whole team pointing the right direction with a single mission statement document that works.

1. Get your stakeholder’s real needs.

What problems should the design solve? To find out, start with three questions:

What is the company about?
What impacts their bottom line?
How do they benefit their customers?

At first, answers are often superficial. Keep asking until you get the real story. “We need a website that tells people about us” is not a strong answer. “We help people to accomplish X” is. It’s your value proposition, and your product’s promise. For example, our own website states that “UXPin is the UX Design Platform that gets it right.”

Try this: Visit your favorite site, or better yet your own site. Can you sum up its benefit based on its first-impression-making home page? Can you put it into a sentence?

2. Decide what “success” looks like.

“Success” is the measure of how well a product solves problems — yours and your users’. We can determine it with hard analytics or subjectively with, say, comments on social media. In either case, partial success is when a site or app fulfills either the client’s or the end users’ goals. Total success is when it does both.

A good measure of success includes three specific factors:

A goal, e.g. doubling signups
A rate, like signups per week
A timeframe to gather results, like six months

So a good (if lofty) measure might be to double signups per week by the end of six months.

3. Engage your team.

It’s said that no plan survives contact with implementation, and UX is no different. Once the goals are clear to you, review them with your team to devise potential solutions — and to keep your imagination in check.

“Product video” is an easy line item to write. To implement? Not so much. Ask your team how they plan to meet the goals.

4. Share this in a formal document with the team.

As we wrote in the free Guide to UX Design Process & Documentation, a structured process helps us consider the emotional, physical, and supplemental parts of the product. We don’t need anything elaborate, just a mission statement that defines the goals and measure of success. Keep your team stoked with conversation: “how can we achieve X?”

Write them down. Give everyone a copy. Then put them to good use:

In brainstorms. Keep creative sessions on track by starting with a review of this doc. In particular, mind maps tend to wander a bit too much without guidance.
In collaboration. Conclude meetings with this document. Did your team decide something that will help us achieve your goals?
In staying positive. Keep your team stoked by framing goals as challenges. The key is to carry on with “and,” not “but.” For example, “That looks great, and how does this help us to … ?”
In user testing. Click at random through your site. Don’t aim, just go. If you find yourself meandering, then your pages need better calls to action. But if you end up at something that meets your goals, then you have a good user flow.
In real-world situations. Talk to your client’s customers, or ask your client to casually poll them. What do they keep asking for? If there’s a trend, then there’s an opportunity to adapt the goals.

Writing your goals down and sharing with the team allows you to have more informed discussions. It also keeps the project on track and helps to avoid feature creep.

Going forward

Designers sometimes build websites based on the its merits. But that misses the mark. How does a website achieve the company’s or organization’s goals? What’s your measure of success?

As we discussed in our e-book, UX Design Process Best Practices, there are many kinds of formal documents: specs, style guides, mood boards and change logs, to name a few. Get the free e-book to learn more about keeping your team on track.

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