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
See more Design OKR Templates →
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
See more Design OKR Templates →
A common mistake when tracking OKRs is to use a spreadsheet. They’re flexible, but you’ll lack the ability to see trends and it’ll quickly become hard to manage for your team.
Instead you can use Tability to simplify the tracking of your OKRs–and as a bonus, you’ll find dozens of templates ready to go in the app.
If you’re looking for some inspiration, here are some example of metrics that can be relevant for your Key Results.
UX tests
Tests run to validate existing and proposed user experiences.
Engagement
How people engaged with your app, websites and services.
Net Promoter Score (NPS)
Measures how likely users are to recommend your product.
Activation rate
How many evaluators turn into active users.
Retention rate
How many users come back to the product.
Number steps for X
How many steps it takes for a user to do X
Open/closed rate of design issues
What the ratio of open to close issues related to design
Task churn
How many users abandon a task before completing it
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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