Our one-page measurement framework

Previously, we’ve covered how measuring the effectiveness of your work is everyone’s responsibility and we’ve busted a few measurement myths.

In both of these articles, one of the key messages is that measurement needs to be easy to do. If it feels too complex or takes too much effort, it’s easy to let measurement slip.

Our solution is to keep it simple. To do this, we've a downloadable one-page measurement framework which can be used on any experience design project, big or small.

In this article, we’ll use a fictional project to explain how to use it to measure the effectiveness of your work.

Start with the problem statement

Before you get into the detail of choosing metrics and setting targets, you should write a problem statement. It’s a simple articulation of what your team is being asked to do. 

Here’s an example statement for a fictional greetings card company:

By writing and agreeing on a problem statement, you’re making sure everyone is on the same page before you start going into the details.

It’s surprisingly common for team members to start a project with different ideas of what they want to achieve and without agreement, you can get stuck when working out the details of the measurement framework.

Don’t worry if the statement feels imprecise – the measurement framework section is where we capture the detail behind these words.

Identify the type of impact you’re creating

As we discussed in our article on measurement myths, what counts as success in each project you do will vary. Every project you do has a direct or indirect impact on business outcomes, but how you measure that impact will be different.

The success of a project doesn’t have to be measured by an end goal like increased sales, cost reduction and the like. If you’re creating personas, success means that they’re being used, they’re visible and they’re still relevant in more than 6 months’ time. 

To help us understand what type of impact our work creates (and therefore what type of things to measure), we next need to fill in the top right of the worksheet:

Every project will impact one or more of the following:

• The experience people get: Projects in this category seek to improve the product and service that people are using. Changes here directly impact business outcomes like sales and customer service enquiries
• Execution against the plan: Projects in this category seek to improve how a business makes decisions about customer experience and how it changes it using design and technology. Example projects include upskilling team members, introducing a design system or creating a set of personas. There isn’t a direct impact on business outcomes
• Business strategy and plan: Projects in this category seek to improve the priorities of the business and influence what time, resource and budget is spent on. Examples would be creating a mobile app strategy or a proof-of-concept for a new proposition. This work doesn’t create a direct impact on business outcomes 

Once you know what type of project you’re doing, then you can move on to creating a more detailed measurement framework.

Fill out the measurement framework

In this section, we create a detailed plan for what we want to measure and how we’re going to measure it.

Outcome

The first step is to identify the high-level outcomes that your work is trying to achieve. I recommend you do this first, before moving on to the other columns in the table.

Remember that you want to measure how effective your work is, not create a list of every possible metric for the user experience. 

Signal 

Once you have all of your outcomes, then you need to define how you will know that the outcome has been achieved.

In this example we only have one signal per outcome, but it’s common to have more than one, especially if the outcome is ambiguous (e.g. “increase engagement”).

Today it is…

If you have a signal that is easily measured, then make sure you put a timespan on it (e.g. £1.5m sales in the last 12 months). If the signal has never been measured or is not applicable, that’s ok too.

Our target

We deliberately split this into two parts to avoid the fear that comes with setting a single target: What if I don’t make the target?

In our framework, “is at least” is a number below which you would be disappointed and “our aspiration” is a number above which the project would be hailed as a success. 

By when

Every target needs to be time-bound.

In this overly simplistic example, we’ve given ourselves a year, but in reality you would probably have a much shorter amount of time to determine if the redesign was a success or not. 

Data source

You need to make sure you know who to ask for the data or what system to look in.

If the data isn’t currently tracked, you’ll need to make a plan for how it will be tracked so that you can collect the results later. 

Result 

Once the results are in, record them and (hopefully) celebrate the impact of your work!

Measurement doesn’t need to be hard

While the largest projects need a more sophisticated approach, there’s always value in starting with filling out a simple worksheet.

Having such a limited framework makes you focus on what’s really important and prevents you from jumping straight into Excel and listing dozens of metrics that you could track.

Our worksheet shows that measuring the effectiveness of your work doesn’t have to be complex and time-consuming. Everything you need to do can be represented on a page and that makes it feel much more achievable.

If you download our measurement worksheet, we’d love to know your thoughts on it.