The importance of design metrics
December 03, 2008 at 8:22 pm
Good design is hard to quantify. If design is effective in communicating to its audience it becomes transparent; you simply don't notice it at all. If you don't believe me just stop to think about how you use motorway and road signage. I'd be willing to bet you don't think about its design at all when driving, just the information it communicates. An example of great information design.
But design is a very subtle and touchy feely discipline that's hard to quantify on face value alone. We've all received great feedback in the past about how pleasant our designs are, but this doesn't always convince stakeholders the true value of design and that it largely dictates the success of a product. So to help justify the value of our designs we need to take the qualitative discipline of design and turn it into a quantitative one. Put simply, we need to record hard numbers, and ensure we record them at the beginning of a project.
There are several ways of doing this. Producing surveys on the emotional aspect of a design is a good start. Typically this would involve running a design experience past current/potential users, i.e. 'On a scale of 1-5, how easy was it to register your details on the online form (1=hard and 5=easy)'? There are also numbers that can be extracted by timing certain activities, i.e. 'It took 6 minutes for the user to register their details on the form'. You can also sniff around the server activity too, i.e. '50% of users drop out at the second stage of registration' etc.
Measuring this type of activity is fairly straightforward on an existing product, but what happens if the product doesn't exist yet? Well, this is where recording metrics has a two-fold purpose. Not only is recording metrics a great way of base lining an existing product, it also helps in setting quantitative goals for products - both new and existing. For example, if you are designing a registration form for a 'new' product why not look at your competitors? How long does it take to register on their site? Is it acceptable, where can you improve? Can you make it your competitive advantage? You can also run a survey on the relative satisfaction of a competitor's process too. What is their shop conversion rate, etc?
Once you have captured rich quantitative data, you can start to set the goals of the product and understand the targets the product needs to achieve to determine success. These are the very goals in which to measure your designs against. Then, upon the launch of the product, or under test conditions, you can measure its results against the original base lined figures. If you have done a good job with your design, the numbers will surely reflect it. This will ultimately confirm the true value of design to your stakeholders, and hopefully get you some well deserved kudos in the process too.
- Filed under:
- Design,
- Research,
- User experience
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January 18, 2009 at 9:41 am
Well I just read this & another article within 5 minutes of each other & a certain irony struck me.
Thank you for sharing;
March 10, 2009 at 6:13 pm
Great post. This concept is focused on measuring and controlling the performance of the business or organization.
June 19, 2009 at 10:11 am
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visitor wrote:
January 16, 2009 at 10:38 am
Design elements with low cohesion should be considered for refactoring, for instance, by extracting parts of the functionality to separate classes with clearly defined responsibilities.
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