🔗 🧠 #13: Measuring Design Impact

We’ve all been there. Staring at our portfolio case study, getting ready to debrief with a stakeholder, or just generally sitting in existential dread. What did this thing I design actually do. Was it successful? What even was considered successful?

I find myself struggling with this train of thought often. While there’s not an easy answer to any of this—I thought I’d dive a bit into how some folks have tried to find answers.

There’s no perfect formula that works for everyone (if there is plz let me know). Every discipline, problem, business, and user has unique needs. But having a few frameworks in your back pocket can help you figure out the right approach when you need it.

Let’s dig into how you might measure your impact.

— Jake

TODAY'S EDITION

1. 🤿 Dive Club | Ryan Scott — Making Strategic Impact as an IC

2. A Practical Example of How to Measure the Impact of Design | Design for Growth

3. How to Measure Design Impact - Tanner Christensen's Notes

4. How to Quantify the Value of Design

5. The 6 Levels of UX Maturity

NOW YOU’RE SPEAKING MY LANGUAGE

When designers wanna make a bigger impact, we can often get stuck between our craft and business outcomes. Design education—whether from universities, bootcamps, or elsewhere—does a pretty poor job in preparing us for the business side of building products. Getting to the next level of influence requires learning a new language. Learning to talk metrics, strategy, and outcomes in ways that resonate beyond the design team.

THE JUICE

Start With Curiosity: Don't wait for permission to understand business metrics. Show genuine interest in what drives decisions by asking questions about goals, numbers, and strategy. Even if you don’t understand at first, keep asking questions until it makes sense.

Bridge The Divide: Move past the "us vs them" mentality with other teams. Since designers are the minority in most companies, success comes from making it "us and us"—being a true partner rather than just a service provider.

Unlock Credibility: It's not enough to just learn the business context—you gotta consistently demonstrate it. Show up to meetings prepared to discuss not just design, but timelines, metrics, and strategic impact.

Break Down Silos: Different companies operate with different levels of cross-functional collaboration. Some have rigid swim lanes, others are more fluid. Learn to recognize these cultural patterns wherever you’re at and adapt your approach accordingly.

Connect The Dots: Frame design decisions in terms of business opportunities, not just user needs (but don’t forget about those either. That’s like, a pretty big reason why you’re designing). When you can tie your work to clear business outcomes, you gain the credibility to push for bigger changes.

Build Alignment: Rather than trying to "drive" alignment, bring stakeholders in early as advisors. Have clear hypotheses about what could go wrong and plans to address them. Sometimes you need all the pieces to align before seeing positive results—don't give up too early.

Dive deeper

THE NUMBERS GAME

Now that you can speak the language—how do your designs actually relate to the business? Connecting your pixel-perfect work to outcomes can feel impossible. A lot of teams either skip measurement entirely or fall into the trap of looking at metrics after the fact and trying to make assumptions.

But measuring design impact shouldn’t feel spooky and mysterious—it just needs the right framework for the job and, most importantly, should start well before you’re making rectangles.

THE JUICE

Start With the Why and KPI: Don't just track random metrics—tie your design work to clear business objectives. "Increase engagement" is too vague; "increase premium subscription conversions by reducing friction in the upgrade flow" gives you something concrete to measure.

Break It Down: Split loftier design initiatives into smaller, measurable chunks. “Increasing checkout conversion” might actually have three separate inputs and experiments with their own hypothesis: e.g. new product cards, simplified forms, and better error states. Each project should be trackable on its own.

Science Experiment 101: Be sure to isolate those variables. Change one thing at a time and keep your control groups clean. If you're updating both your navigation and payment flow at once, you'll never know which change drove the results.

Build Your Funnel: Map how design changes influence user behavior step by step. If your hypothesis is that better product photography will increase sales, track the whole journey:

• Do more users click product images?

• Do they spend more time viewing details?

• Does this lead to more add-to-carts?

• Do more complete purchase?

Track Early, Track Often: Set up your measurement framework before you start designing, not after. The best insights come from comparing before and after data, not just looking at final results.

Due Diligence: Mix quantitative data (conversion rates, engagement metrics) with qualitative insights (user interviews, support tickets). Sometimes the most important design impacts don't show up in your analytics dashboard—like reduced customer confusion or improved brand perception.

Dive deeper

FRAMEWORKS MIXER

The beauty of finding frameworks is that you don't always have to use a single one for everything. Sometimes, circumstances call for you to mix and match what you need based on experience and current problem context. This article combines top tasks and PURE to measure design impact.

THE JUICE

Start With Jobs: Map out every stage, job, and task your users need to accomplish in the problem area. And this isn’t just a feature list of what you offer—it's trying to understand the complete journey from your users' perspective, whether or not you’re currently solving it.

Get the Pain Points: Survey both internal experts and actual customers about what parts of the process are painful or frustrating. Create a "pain index" by rating tasks from exciting (1) to upsetting (4).

Break Down Top Tasks: Once you've identified the most painful areas, document every single step users need to take to complete these critical tasks. No detail is too small.

Score Your Solutions: Have internal experts rate each workflow step on three factors:

• Ease of use

• Speed

• Efficiency

Track Progress: Re-evaluate scores quarterly. Lower overall scores mean your design improvements are working—higher scores mean it's time to rethink your approach.

Beyond The Numbers: While metrics help track progress, remember they're just one part of measuring design impact. Balance quantitative scores with qualitative feedback about how your changes affect the actual user experience.

Dive deeper

SHIFTING MINDSET

Sometimes we find ourselves in an odd disconnect within our orgs. Everyone knows (or claims to) the importance of great user experience, but still treats design as a superficial final touch. Here’s another framework to help move beyond justifying design's existence and start showing exactly how design choices drive business success.

THE JUICE

Measure What Matters: Break down design's value into four key areas:

• Design Activity: Specific tools and methods used

• Outcomes: Direct results of those activities

• Benefits: Business value delivered

• Measures: Quantifiable metrics to track success

Success Stories That Matter: Study real impact across other organizations, how are they surfacing the value of design:

• Facebook's visual fix-a-thon led to significant revenue increases

• PayPal's content redesign boosted international checkouts

• Nationwide saved resources by researching what customers actually wanted

Focus on Outcomes: Instead of narrowing in on metrics like NPS scores, reframe problems to look at underlying causes. Good design shifts conversations from asking "how" or “what” to asking "why."

Make Friends: When organizations see design as overhead, showing measurable impact on revenue helps to mature the practice and create likeminded folks who understand its value.

Dive deeper

MATURING LIKE A FINE WINE

Great. You can talk about the business. You can tie the lingo to your design decisions. You have frameworks you wanna use to test and experiment. Why is understanding design impact still so hard?

Well, the good and bad news may lie in the idea of a maturity model—ways to assess an organization's maturity in areas like growth, data, and design. If the organization as a whole isn't ready to progress to the next level of maturity, it’s gonna be hard to drive impact.

So how might you understand where your organization stands in terms of design maturity? Glad you asked.

THE JUICE

The Six Stages: Organizations usually fall into one of these maturity levels:

• Absent: UX is ignored or nonexistent

• Limited: UX work happens rarely and haphazardly

• Emergent: UX work is functional but inconsistent

• Structured: Semi-systematic UX methods are widespread but vary in effectiveness

• Integrated: UX work is comprehensive and pervasive

• User-Driven: Deep user-centered dedication at all levels

No Skipping Steps: Moving from one level to the next takes time—trying to jump multiple levels at once rarely works. Each stage needs time to seep into the culture.

Beyond Just One Team: A single team can't reach high maturity levels alone. True maturity requires consistency across teams and leadership support across the org.

Four Key Growth Areas: Improving maturity will mean evolution across:

• Strategy: Leadership and resource prioritization

• Culture: Building UX knowledge and practitioner growth

• Process: Systematic use of research and design methods

• Outcomes: Defining and measuring UX results

Check Your Progress: Even if all seems fine, there are likely areas for improvement that could help your product creation process, team effectiveness, and experiences.

This is the perfect area for you to gain credibility within your org.

Dive deeper

THANKS FOR READING—SEE YOU NEXT WEEK

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Cheers, Jake