How do we measure the quality of design? What metrics to use? How to bridge business objectives and UX goals? How to remove bias and guesswork from our design decisions? And how to measure and make a case for the impact of your UX work? Well, let’s figure it out, in the session with Vitaly Friedman.
In this session, you’ll learn how to establish team-specific design KPIs, how to track them effectively, and integrate accountability and ownership for these metrics into your design process. Beware: you might not be able to forget what you’ll learn in this session!
Watch this WaysConf session, then continue with related talks or explore the current programme.
At WaysConf 2024, Vitaly Friedman, Creative Lead at Smashing Media AG, addresses the common struggle designers face in proving the business value of user experience. Friedman argues that designers must move beyond simply creating user interfaces and learn to translate design initiatives into the quantitative language of business metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs). He critiques popular but flawed corporate metrics like Net Promoter Score (NPS) and introduces a practical usability toolbox centered on task success rates, time on task, and the System Usability Scale (SUS). To bridge the communication gap between design teams and corporate leadership, Friedman demonstrates how to implement a local and global UX scorecard and construct a visual design KPI tree. This structured approach allows design teams to map user pain points directly to high-level business objectives, such as cost reduction and revenue growth, establishing design as a strategic partner rather than an organizational disruptor.
Designers cannot rely solely on good work to gain organizational influence; they must actively build alliances with departments like sales and customer success who regularly interact with users.
Watch from 7:55To be understood by leadership, designers must bridge the gap between user-centric terms like 'reducing friction' and business-centric metrics like conversion rates and cost reduction.
Watch from 16:55Rather than tracking ambiguous analytics like session duration, teams should measure how successfully and quickly 15 to 18 representative users can complete 12 core tasks.
Watch from 23:18Net Promoter Score is highly volatile and requires at least 1,300 respondents to be statistically significant, making usability-focused surveys like SUS or UMUX-Lite much more reliable for design evaluation.
Watch from 32:24A design KPI tree connects high-level business objectives to specific user pain points, design solutions, and measurable local metrics before any pixels are drawn.
Watch from 37:39These concise notes were edited from automatic captions and checked against the talk structure. They are not a verbatim transcript.
Many designers fall into the trap of believing that user experience is the absolute center of the business universe, assuming other departments will naturally champion good design. In reality, organizations revolve around leadership, with various departments acting as orbiting satellites. Sales and marketing excel because they have a direct line to leadership and are highly skilled at visualizing and communicating their daily impact. To gain equal standing, design teams must establish clear key performance indicators (KPIs) and report their successes to leadership just as effectively as other departments do.
Watch from 10:57There is a profound misalignment between the language spoken in business meetings and the vocabulary used by design teams. Business stakeholders use aggressive, action-oriented terms like conquering markets, capturing mind share, targeting customers, and maximizing lifetime value. In contrast, designers speak of reducing friction, improving consistency, and empowering or helping users. To bridge this gap and avoid being misunderstood, designers should communicate through the neutral language of design metrics and UX KPIs, demonstrating how design changes directly move business numbers.
Watch from 15:05Businesses are often obsessed with standard web analytics like click-through rates, bounce rates, and session duration, but these metrics do not inherently represent user success. For instance, a longer session duration of nearly three minutes is completely ambiguous; it could mean users are highly engaged, or it could mean they are frustrated and unable to find what they need. Similarly, traffic growth is meaningless without quality. Designers must look past these superficial numbers and focus on behavioral and diagnostic metrics that actually reflect whether a user successfully achieved their goal.
Watch from 20:09Two highly impactful but frequently ignored metrics are search quality and time to first success. To measure search quality, teams can map the top 100 search queries against what the search engine currently displays versus what internal experts agree should actually appear. For subscription-based products, tracking the time to first success is critical. This measures how quickly a trial user achieves a personally relevant milestone, such as setting up a financial portfolio, which directly influences whether they will ultimately convert to a premium tier.
Watch from 24:48Although Net Promoter Score (NPS) is widely used by corporations, it is an incredibly fragile and unreliable metric for evaluating user experience. NPS ignores passive scores and calculates the difference between extreme promoters and detractors, meaning significant design improvements might not register on the scale at all. Furthermore, human behavior is contradictory; research shows that over half of the people who actively discourage others from using a brand have also recommended it for specific attributes, and only 55% of self-reported promoters actually recommend the product. To make NPS statistically significant, a massive sample size of around 1,300 people is required.
Watch from 30:32A design KPI tree is a powerful tool for visualizing design intent across an entire organization before drawing a single pixel. It starts with a high-level business goal, such as driving revenue by reducing the time to purchase. Designers then map known user research and pain points, brainstorm targeted design solutions, and define specific, time-bound local metrics to measure success. By translating business objectives into design strategies—such as reducing choice paralysis to help users find top candidates faster—designers can present a highly strategic plan that immediately commands respect from product managers and stakeholders.
Watch from 37:39
