How efficient is our design process?
Do we offer a consistent experience across our tools and services?
How close are we to our customers?
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Most designers are embedded in functional teams, and their focus aligns with the priorities of the group. Are they in a Marketing team? They're mostly working Acquisition. Are they part of a Product team? They're surely tackling Activation and Retention problems. It's safe to say that designers can work on any part of the user journey.
But you can also consider Design as its own function, and think about how they can improve things across the entire organization. Design OKRs can look inwards to enhance processes or outwards to bring consistency across all experiences.
You'll find below an example built around a fictitious company. Your OKRs should move from quarter to quarter and map to your company's reality – that's why we thought it's best to illustrate things as a case study that you can take inspiration from.
Askawoof is a startup building a platform to help companies run customer satisfaction surveys. Designers are part of the Product team, but they recently hired a Head of Design to own the UX and brand effort across the organization.
After meeting with all teams, it was clear that Design needed some clear goals to facilitate UI work and improve the relationship between designers and developers.
Start with the Objectives and make sure that everyone on the team understands what they mean. You want them to be concise, but also precise enough that they give a clear sense of direction.
Avoid general statements like "Create great experiences" and instead focus on the expected outcome "Users engage with our platform more often".
All teams can rapidly build consistent UIs
80% of UI components can be found in a Design System
All forms are using a standard UI Kit across all apps
Reduce significantly the UX issues found in production
At least 20 design tests are run every month
UX issues represent fewer than 20% of new bug reports
100 users have signed up for our early-access program
OKRs won't be of much help if you're not keeping an eye on them. Staying focused and aligned starts by adopting a simple routine with the team.
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Start your Monday by looking at outcomes first (OKRs) and then outputs (roadmap). This will make sure that roadmaps discussions are centered around the most pressing issues.
A common mistake for tracking OKRs is to use a table where you replace values in cells with the most recent update.
Not seeing trends can give you a false sense of security. You may be above the target line today, but the overall trend might be going the wrong way. So make sure that you have a simple way to understand if you're getting off track.
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A simple progress chart can do wonders to help you understand if you're getting off track.
OKRs will most likely cause friction as you expand their use within your organization:
You can greatly simplify things by adopting a platform like Tability that will automate most of the OKRs tracking and make progress easy to see.
If you’re looking for some inspiration, here are some example of metrics that can be relevant for your Key Results.
Tests run to validate existing and proposed user experiences.
How people engaged with your app, websites and services.
Measures how likely users are to recommend your product.
How many evaluators turn into active users.
How many users come back to the product.
How many steps it takes for a user to do X
What the ratio of open to close issues related to design
How many users abandon a task before completing it
