Measurable Design Goals (Growth Design Monthly)

October 2020

Hi Everyone,When I first started my design career, I struggled to justify my design decisions and demonstrated impact. It was tough because I had almost zero data. I often found myself frustrated with the HIPPOs, but couldn't do much to stand up for my designs.When I joined product analytics company Amplitude, I was shocked at just how much data was available, right at my fingertips. It was like finding an oasis after being lost for days in the desert. After making sure it wasn’t a mirage, I dove right into the data, determined to put it to work. I decided I would set a measurable goal for every project I do even if it’s not “required” by anyone. This became a very helpful discipline for me: I started to forget about the excessive polishing work that my inner perfectionist begged for, and instead focused on creating the leanest solution that would help me reach my goal. Our design reviews also transformed into feedback on how to hit the goal, rather than things like, “Your border radius is too much.” And “failure” became a motivating, inspiring question of how to do better next time (trust me, I failed a lot). Now, I work on Adobe Stock. My aim is to shift our design culture to a growth mindset; the first thing I’m focused on is helping the team set design goals.Measurably yours,Ran LiuGrowthDesigners.co Community MemberSenior Growth Designer at Adobe

How to Set Measurable Goals for Your Next Design Project

Setting goals isn’t something foreign to most of us. Frameworks like OKRs or SMART Goals are common among teams of all types and sizes. But I rarely see this practice being adopted by designers. Setting measurable goals for your design projects helps you align your stakeholders, keep your team accountable, and demonstrate the impact of your design.  

Targets vs. RangeA goal consists of a metric and a target. The metric reflects how you define success for your project and the target is how much you want to improve the metric.Sometimes the target can be a range—a base target and an aspirational stretch target. 

Targets in ActionWhen I first joined Amplitude’s growth team, we were working on a lot of tiny experiments, like changing button colors, the hero layout, or the copy. But these experiments weren’t going to give us meaningful improvements towards our goal. The (really big) gap between our current state and our target ultimately made us go big: We did a dramatic homepage redesign. This redesign exceeded our original target of 10% conversion improvement and achieved a whopping 14.8% improvement in lead conversion.

Before (left) and after (right) designs of Amplitude's homepage

Guest Editor BioRan is a product designer who helps teams achieve measurable business impact through design. Before joining Adobe as a Senior Growth Designer, Ran designed user experiences at Amplitude, Marketo and Chartboost. In her spare time, she enjoys making illustrations, mentoring junior designers and getting involved with awesome design communities like GrowthDesigner.co. 

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