How to measure and communicate the value of UX

Haymkarran S Bhalla at UXDX Community: EMEA Series. Video: https://youtu.be/pxeMDmrOY_o

Readable transcript: edited from the recording's captions for readability (fillers and false starts removed, punctuation and section headings added). Wording is the speaker's own. Timestamps are positions in the video. Names marked [?] could not be verified against the audio.

Why designers must measure and communicate value

[00:00:00] Host: Welcome, Haymkarran.

[00:00:02] Haymkarran: Hello, welcome everybody. I hope I'm audible.

[00:00:05] Host: You are. If you can share your screen, we'll get started.

[00:00:09] Haymkarran: Sounds good, let's get started. Thank you for the warm welcome, and good morning, good afternoon, good evening to everybody joining this session. I'm so glad that I've been chosen to give a session here today at UXDX. Let's get started right away.

[00:00:27] Welcome everybody. I'm here to talk about a topic that's less spoken about in design teams. We often get stranded in concerns about delivery teams not delivering that well as far as CX outcomes, visual outcomes or UX outcomes are concerned. Hence there is an imperative demand by companies that young CX professionals understand how you measure your design decisions and, most importantly, how you communicate them, so that the value created out of UX is measurable as an outcome and is looked up to by the C-suite of the company as a credible investment within the firm.

[00:01:16] I'm going to go to full Zoom; I hope this is visible. Let's get started right away with a very quick problem. This is an actual statement given by one of our past clients. He says that in the past they've hired a bunch of UX designers. Sadly, though, they learned that the outcome of their work only made the product a tad more useful, but not credible enough. Now why do you think this would have happened? One, the designers did not measure the design outcomes. Two, they were not able to effectively communicate the value-driven approach while taking decisions. I'm sure you could think of many other problems as well, but let's just focus on these two for today.

[00:02:05] What am I going to cover? How can you as a young designer quickly understand the business? How can you understand product profiles, and what the hell is this TAM here? Let's understand how you identify a market around the product offerings, and how you narrow down that market so that you're actually targeting the right users as far as creating an experience is concerned. Next, let's try and understand how you create a solid case to invest in design. Points number two and four are correlated: how do you convert that understanding into a model so that it's sustainable enough for the companies to take it further? And most importantly, it is imperative for designers to understand that working in UX environments can never be a solo success or a siloed success. You always have to work with cross-functional teams, so let's discuss a strategy around how you work well with cross-functional teams.

Understanding the business and its stakeholders

[00:03:06] Let's quickly jump on to the first one, which is understanding the business. If you look at the left-hand side, I've noted a couple of activities that you could do to understand who your stakeholders are. One, create a stakeholder mapping, where you can understand what the role of the stakeholder in the organization is, what they are expecting you to do as a design professional, as a CX professional, how they define their success within the organization, and how you can help them define their success within the organization. Craft a thorough understanding of the business vision and missions, so that you go back to the C-suite convincingly and say, by understanding this we are able to structure a roadmap that can help your business in the future. That could be your product roadmaps, that could be your field roadmaps, or that could be your feature-driven roadmaps.

[00:04:02] Then there are a couple of activities listed here, but if you look at it, the crux is that you need to build a collaborative design process. Unless and until you involve the business in every single activity you do, you cannot expect credible outcomes, you cannot expect credible results, and you cannot expect the C-suite to trust you to invest in the CX initiative that is expected to be taken.

[00:04:30] Moving on, here is a quick model that I've created that thoroughly involves every single stakeholder. On the left-hand side you can see a couple of stakeholders. On the extreme right is my vision, my expectation from this model, this approach, where at every single instance you are defining, you're measuring, you're testing, you're documenting your progress with cross-functional teams, and then taking the next steps. More on this later in the next session: I'll be taking a session on the 20th of December as well, so I'll be more than glad to describe this later.

Identifying and measuring problems

[00:05:07] Now let's look at how you define an ROI model. Before we focus directly on the steps, let's look at how you identify problems and how you measure them. I'm very sure you would be aware of most of these methods here. I'm not going to deep dive into definitions, but let's take examples and try to study this. Let's take one of the examples on the left-hand side, e-commerce as an industry. Imagine you need to redesign Amazon. What are the areas of focus that you would look into to set up a design roadmap, to set up a CX roadmap? Here are a few examples. How would you benchmark the decisions with certain KPIs? Here are some examples.

[00:05:56] On the right, how do you benchmark certain decisions with the help of user research? This slide might be slightly arguable depending on the context that you are in. Some of the methods described here might not fit well under the heading of, say, UX research. However, it is imperative to understand how you take insights from this slide and blend them within your own context where you work, and try to create a strategy around it.

[00:06:25] The way you identify problems is through a host of areas. One is to identify the areas that you want to look into to find problems: not feature sets, but problems. Second, identify certain key performing areas, or identifiers, where you try and understand: here are the low-hanging fruits of improvement, here are the feature sets that need an additional set of efforts to bring to realization. And finally, with the help of some UX research methods, you'll also be able to understand problem areas. Those problem areas can be further bifurcated into product, into users, and into your market understandings.

[00:07:07] On the bottom right you can see certain people to speak to. These are not limited to the ones mentioned here, but this is just a contextual understanding of what to do: how do you identify problems, and what areas do you look into for a particular space.

Building an ROI model for UX

[00:07:23] Let's take the other example, which is measuring. I'm just taking one, which is UX costs. Now what exactly is this? You reach out to a company which requires you to redesign a platform. They are not too keen on investing in design, so you have to build a solid business case, so that the C-suite understands the importance of investing in UX, takes it a step further in realizing it amongst the internal teams, invests in the design process, brings in the right teams to make the right changes, and then finally measures the outcomes as required.

[00:08:03] To do that, here's a simple thing that you could do. Identify a UX cost. This could be quantifiable, or it could be qualitative as well. For example, imagine at Amazon 200 customers cancel their purchases per day. This is a sample case. The channels that you could leverage could be, say, the Seller Central analytics, or customer service in any format or fashion. For the business impact, say the average cart value would be 50 US dollars. Now the total daily loss is huge for the company. This is just a sample case; I'm just using Amazon as an example for you to consider.

[00:08:42] Another UX cost could be, for example, loss of brand loyalty or brand recall, and that stems from very small problems that you could solve. For example, let's say 100 users do not validate their email addresses. Now translate that to an e-commerce site where you're not able to make purchases unless you validate. These are examples of UX costs.

[00:09:06] What I explained is just the first bit, which is UX costs. Now, step one in creating an ROI model is to document the current situation. Reach out to the stakeholders and try to understand the current situation. For example, let's say you get feedback along these lines: declining revenue, shrinking market share, frustrated customers, increasing investments in customer acquisition costs, and there could be many, many more. So step one for you is to understand thoroughly what the current situation around the problem is.

[00:09:48] Step two is to visualize and give a preview of CX-fueled benefits: if you do this, if you rectify the journeys, here is a plausible positive outcome that you could realize in the organization. This is mentioned at a very high level in the slide. What you could do further is to quantify this and showcase a timeline: this year here would be the roadmap, second year, third year, fourth year onwards. This is the kind of roadmap that we expect to have for the CX-fueled benefits.

[00:10:23] Step three is the most important. This is exactly where you're doing your blueprinting analysis. You want to understand how you invest in bringing this initiative to life. How do you calculate the investments? Make sure you make everything transparent as a case for the clients to understand what steps are to be taken from day one to the final day, to ensure that whatever we think of as a goal to achieve with the help of a CX ROI model can be achieved later.

[00:10:57] Step four is creating something which is sustainable as a model. It's not something that you create like a book, close it off, and that's it, you don't make amendments further. This is always getting changed based on a plethora of situations around you. Ensure that you bring in the right projections and document them well. Ensure you are really careful in doing the risk handling and mitigations. Ensure that your teams are forward thinking. Ensure that you define a very clear baseline for your product lines, a very clear baseline of service deliveries, and a good North Star to aspire towards, so that every single member of your cross-functional teams realizes it in the near future when they set their own goals.

[00:11:48] And finally, you also have multiple other methods through which you can create CX models. Service blueprinting is imperative in this case, where every stakeholder takes the right accountability to ensure that end-to-end journeys are addressed within the particular CX landscape, or the product roadmap, through the stakeholders.

Product profiling

[00:12:13] Let's have a quick talk on product profiling. I am very sure some of you here have looked at such a template earlier. This is very simple to understand. You're trying to document what the product is, probably a use case or a set of use cases around it, benefits for the business, benefits for customers, benefits for users, and also thinking around demand generation, around certain validations that are required, and around boundaries or limitations that are necessary to understand how you could profile the product accurately.

[00:12:53] I've shown an Apple Watch on the right-hand side just to give you an example to consider. Imagine Apple wants to create a product that a customer can wear on the wrist and use for measuring their fitness goals. Now try to visualize this entire step-by-step journey to create the entire profile for your Apple Watch. What you should be careful about in doing so is, for example, these two boxes over here. Some of you might be confused about why I have written user benefit versus customer benefit.

[00:13:24] A gym, for example, might buy a couple of Apple Watches for their trainers, so that they are able to map statistics accurately for the members attending the gym. That's a case where an entity becomes a customer of Apple. The trainer, or the person going to the gym, like you and me, are the users here. Imagine it in this context: the entities could be high-level customers, and users are the actual people who are going to use the product. Another thing to take care of here is boundary conditions. I'm going to elaborate more on this on the next slide, where we'll understand how you narrow down a market that needs to be addressed.

Narrowing down the market: TAM, SAM and SOM

[00:14:12] At the start, we started off by saying how do you identify and measure the value of UX. As designers, many of us get into product engagements where we need to go through a thorough research phase. Sometimes I see designers getting fixated only on certain activities, like persona creation or empathy maps or journey maps. But how many of us actually try to understand, from a business sense, from a business angle, how the target groups that you define as personas are actually getting mapped by the company? Did you understand what the total addressable market is? Did you understand, from a business standpoint, what the serviceable addressable and the serviceable obtainable market are? Let's understand this very quickly with an example.

[00:15:09] Imagine you want to build a company that sells water. I'm just looking at the time to check we are on track. Okay, perfect. Imagine that you want to make a company that sells water. Let's say you want to sell one-liter water bottles, and imagine there are eight billion people in the world. At a high level, theoretically, the entire world would be your market. You could imagine that to be a total addressable market.

[00:15:44] Now imagine you're in one part of the world. Let's say I am, for example, in Dubai. Dubai is just one piece of the UAE; it's not the entire UAE. And I wish to start locally, I wish to start from here and then scale it up. Now my serviceable addressable market at the beginning gets limited just to Dubai, not even the UAE, forget the entire world.

[00:16:09] Now, out of Dubai, over here on the top right: remember I'm selling a one-liter water bottle. How many Dubai residents, or people living in Dubai, expats as well, would be willing to pay, for example, 20 dirhams, 30 dirhams, 40 dirhams, 100 dirhams for a one-liter water bottle? Translate the currency to the country where you're living. Imagine how many of you in the US would be willing to pay two dollars, five dollars, ten dollars for a one-liter water bottle. I'm just giving you examples. Now, how do you narrow down a market that finally becomes a target market? If you want to start a company today and say that yes, the entire world population is my market, no, that will not be the case. You need to understand how you narrow down a target market, and then...

[00:17:09] Host: Haymkarran, we appear to have lost audio. I'm not sure what happened, but we just lost audio. I just heard a click, and then I can't hear anything you've said for the last maybe 20 seconds.

[00:17:46] Haymkarran: Could you let me know where I could start again from?

[00:17:50] Host: You had said that the whole world is not your market.

[00:17:55] Haymkarran: Perfect, thank you. I hope I'm audible now.

[00:18:02] Host: Yeah, you're audible now.

[00:18:03] Haymkarran: Okay, awesome. As designers, make sure that you always go back to the business and understand the target market from their sales, from a business sense. It's not just what you quickly create personas about, or empathy maps about, or your journey maps around. Make sure that whatever you craft as your insight reaches back to the business, so that they validate it for you and really get back to you and say, yes, this is the target market for us, or these are the segmented users for us. This is exactly how you narrow down a market that is finally obtainable for the business, and you target only those customers that should be the highest in conversions initially for the position. Then you gradually grow the market size around it and try to acquire more and more customers with the betterments within the CX.

Final thoughts

[00:19:04] Final thoughts. We looked at a way to understand how you study the business in terms of stakeholders. Apologies for that. We looked at how you understand the business, how you understand stakeholders, and how you understand responsibilities within the business, so that you can gel well within the teams and work well with the cross-functional teams. And the core focus throughout, whether it is benchmarking through user research features, or benchmarking through KPIs, or understanding certain focus areas to identify certain problems, should be this: identifying problems and not feature sets. Do not get into a deep dive where you're just documenting feature sets for a product. Make sure that you go back to the business and document core problems to solve. That will be the most valuable for the company.

[00:20:12] Second, I showed you a product loop, a design loop, where multiple stakeholders interface together and there are no environments where designers are working in silos. That's exactly where this learning comes from: you need to have a shared understanding of everything around the work that you are doing. Make sure every stakeholder has the same information that you have, and everybody is on the same page about the entire design process or design approach that you take. Make sure that you work on a unified product roadmap, and don't work individually on siloed roadmaps that don't talk to the other cross-functional teams. You might have your own field roadmaps, but make sure that you have every discussion transparent among stakeholders, so that you get the right collective buy-in at the right time.

[00:21:12] Thirdly, you're not just supposed to deliver everything as a designer unless and until you measure every single outcome, with the help of either KPIs or any other metrics that you define. It could be your SUS metrics, it could be your CSAT metrics, or it could be your effort scores. Anything that you define should ensure that you're able to measure every single outcome of your thought process, of your design decision making. Do not just focus on delivering everything.

[00:21:45] And finally, make sure that you lead by influencing others. Make sure that you lead not by designation. Your work should influence others to do more. As designers, you should be able to instill the right trust in stakeholders, so that they gain the confidence that investing in design, investing in CX initiatives, is something that will help them scale further.

[00:22:10] Once you do all of this collectively, that's when you'll be able to better communicate as a designer, and that's when you'll be able to better influence others in cross-functional teams as well, so that the value of design gets very clearly instilled amongst the business. Furthermore, what you would end up doing is creating design-led organizations, and that's exactly where the importance of design is instilled right from the initial stages, the discovery stages, of the processes within the company.

[00:22:50] That should be it. Thank you for giving me this opportunity for the quick session. I'm open to questions, and I hope the insights shared in this session would help you in your own context, where you could apply some of these lenses and make sure that you are able to build something credible for organizations wherever you are. Thank you.

Q&A

[00:23:19] Host: Great, thank you very much. That was a really interesting session; I really enjoyed it. We have gotten a few questions through, but if anybody does have any more questions, please feel free to share them and I'll be happy to put them to Haymkarran. The first one, and I think this is a really good one, came in from Leslie. She's asked: a lot of that seems to be product responsibility, identifying the market and things like that. So where is the boundary between what's the responsibility of design versus what's the responsibility of product?

[00:23:53] Haymkarran: I'll give you another lens to look at it. The boundary is not where we are segregating responsibilities. Rather, the way I recommend looking at it is that you merge together as one team and ensure that designers understand everything through and through. The designers may not have the business acumen to define the markets at the beginning. What they can do, however, is get this collective understanding from the product teams and ensure that we are crafting a roadmap for that specific target market. Unless there is a joint understanding between the designers and the product teams, whatever you wish to create with that initial learning might not be fruitful.

[00:24:38] Host: Great, so it ties into your silos everywhere: replace those and get into more of the team learning. That's great. There's another question from Francesca. She's asked: at the start you mentioned previewing benefits as one of your points, and used the example of the 200 checkouts. But how do you validate that that's accurate before you do the research? She gave the example that people could be going to checkout because that's the only place they see the shipping costs, so you're not going to convert every single one of those.

[00:25:14] Haymkarran: That's a pretty fair point, where we might be only partly true in documenting the outcomes, and we might not have the right association of that being a UX cost. However, having said that, it still gives you an initial high-level understanding of where the pitfalls are within the digital journeys. It's not something that becomes a thumb rule for you to take further. But like I mentioned, UX costs need not just be quantifiable; they can be qualitative as well, where you understand behaviors of customers, you understand the notions of customers, and you try to understand through multiple other ways what the dilutions within the experience are. For example, you could bring your SUS scores or your CSAT scores into the picture. There could be many other ways to understand the behavior of customers around your products and services.

[00:26:14] Very true, quantitative costs alone might not be the right thumb rule to relate to UX costs, but there are many other ways to define UX costs that give you the right picture of customer behavior around the products.

[00:26:32] Host: Brilliant, thank you for that answer, and thank you for sharing your presentation there. I really enjoyed it, and I hope everybody out there watching enjoyed it as well. This is all we have time for, but thank you very much.

[00:26:44] Haymkarran: Thank you so much everybody, and all the best to the next speaker. Enjoy the day, thank you.