The article below summarizes insights that our founder Erin Young shared with Bandan Jot Singh, a product leader and author of the Productify blog, a collection of high quality product case studies, innovation & growth articles, product upskill narratives and more.
Business leaders are all about numbers, but spreadsheets and KPIs are not the sort of things that’s taught in design school or even in bootcamps. As a result, designers sometimes struggle to communicate effectively with business leaders. When that happens, the value of UX contributions can come into question.
If you’re leading a team of designers (or want to ensure that their contributions are recognized), there are several steps you can take to bridge this gap.
Train your Design Team on the Business
Designers need to understand the products and services you sell, and how you sell them. (More about that here.) Take the time to explain the industry and the acronyms to new hires. Seniors designers will definitely ask, but less experienced designers can be shy about asking questions for fear of looking uninformed. Make sure that appropriate training is a part of every designer’s onboarding process.
Include designers in conversations about business metrics and copy them on performance reports. Share the status of the overall business and the impacts of individual initiatives, and include them in brainstorms. You might be surprised by what happens when you add your most creative team members to the business roundtable
Through training and exposure, you can cultivate well-trained, business-savvy designers. When you hire experienced talent, look for designers who are curious about the business. A strong senior design candidate can explain how they've applied their business knowledge to fuel design recommendations.
Assign UX to High-Impact Projects
As we all know, some projects create more value than others. Do we assign a UX team to redesign the password reset screen, or do we ask them to improve the flow for getting a quote? Should they focus on the pixel-perfection of the internal design system, or develop their workshop facilitation skills?
Developers can solve many UI challenges on their own, using today’s UI conventions and the styles and patterns of your existing experience. Ask yourself whether design is likely to move the needle on a project rather than assuming everything needs to go through UI design first. Sometimes, design can serve as a reviewer rather than a definer.
Assign designers to tough problems that will impact the business, the problems with real space to define the solution. They’ll have a more exciting story to tell about their own value.
Track the Impact You’re Trying to Drive
Many product teams focus on running experiments and measuring the outcomes in a period of weeks of months. But some outcomes (like overall satisfaction or improved brand credibility) aren’t visible in short-term metrics.
If you prioritize long-term problems, you owe it to the team to associated those problems with long-term measurements.
Consider each problem, as well as broader organization values and expectations, and choose measurements that match the mission. Broaden your view on how to showcase value, and help find the data needed to tell the story in a compelling way:
How much money did we save by building this once, in the most effective way?
How much did this improvement reduce support costs? What would that look like, annualized?
What might it cost if we lose the trust of our existing customers?
If there's an outcome you can't measure, but you have reason to believe it happened, be sure to at least make mention of it. There are important parts of the value of UX that don’t correspond directly with short-term results.
Increase Visibility of UX in Your Organization
Designers are often perfectionists, and many of us feel most at home tinkering behind a screen. Your organization’s culture will either enable that or will broaden horizons. You can contribute to a designer’s long-term career potential by encouraging visibility and pushing them gently into exposure.
When designers rely on product leaders to relay information, they give up some of the credit due to them, and lose a chance to make a deeper impression.
Bringing your design partner into presentations can help you, too. When a product manager takes a concept before leadership solo, he or she alone may not put the best foot forward. A unified front between product and design can make presentations more convincing. Designers often recall specific rationale, showcasing the thought that goes into design decisions. A good designer will ask questions that challenge and clarify business feedback.
Measure the Performance of UX Designers
Every employee needs to understand how he or she is performing, and UX is no exception.
In an agency environment like ours we set quarterly missions. We consider repeat business, feedback from clients, feedback from peers, distribution of time spent, and insights from client call reviews to gauge how our designers are performing.
In an in-house environment, managers should consider the outcomes of a designer’s assignments as well as 360-degree peer feedback.
If you ask non-UX stakeholders to provide input about your team, it’s important that they understand what the organization expects of the UX designers. Define your company’s UX roles and clearly document what each role should deliver. Socialize these standards inside and outside the UX organization to ensure that everyone understands expectations and evaluates against the same rubric.
As a manager, you must trust your reports and they must trust you. When you trust your report, you will give them the assignments and insights they need to develop. When they trust you, they will act on your advice. If that trust isn’t there, establishing a trusting relationship must be your top priority.
Create a User-Centered Culture
Product and UX leaders must show their organizations why good user experience is important, and teach colleagues how to leverage the UX talent available to them.
To showcase the value of UX in a metric-driven organization, leaders should ensure that designers are trained on the business, included in conversations about metrics, and assigned to high-impact projects. Encourage designers to present their own work and ask questions. Use clear documentation to ensure that your UX team's performance is evaluated fairly.