Why designers should focus on KPIs
How metrics shape product decisions, and why designers are uniquely positioned to help create better business and human value.
The Impact of Poorly Defined KPIs
Metrics and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are generally used as quantitative signals of “product health” by investors, stakeholders and product teams. Set by product leads, KPIs align with business goals, and help track success as a digital product evolves. So why is this important? Simply put, KPIs have a lot of influence over how teams prioritize, design and build features and products — and over what they decide not to build.
As designers and product leaders, we should take responsibility for the attention and behavioral impact our products have on millions of people around the world
Far too often KPIs are set to superficial or poorly defined goals, leading to negative outcomes for users and businesses. Take the example of a hypothetical coaching app we’ll call Compass, which offers online professional coaching and career support. In order to track product engagement, the Compass team might set a KPI goal around per-user, monthly app opens. To support this goal, they might decide to send weekly push notifications offering career tips, or periodically send users e-mail reminders to schedule coaching sessions. They might even add a content newsfeed to the Compass home screen, to “reward” users opening the app. This may seem like a reasonable approach to bolster engagement metrics, but there’s a few reasons these tactics are misguided — and can fall flat.
Instead of diluting the experience with superficial engagement, teams that measure value-add can build more streamlined products that better benefit the business and users long term
Push notifications could be disruptive to Compass users, causing them to ignore meaningful alerts, miss direct coach messages, and possibly turn off notifications or abandon the app altogether. A “newsfeed” might serve the purpose of bringing up time spent in the app and promote app opens, but do so in a way that is entirely disconnected from career outcomes. Instead, the Compass team could ask — what is a meaningful indicator of coaching success? Could we favor session consistency over app opens? Could we create KPIs around completion of coaching plans? Could we extract data from surveys measuring progress and career impact? What could coaching research tell us about successful career adaptation behaviors, and how might we measure those over time?
How Did We Get Here?
If there is a better approach to KPIs, why have digital product companies become so focused on superficial engagement? Tristan Harris’s work on Time Well Spent explains how tech companies often use time and attention spent to measure product success. This model was designed for advertising products — a high number of impressions, clicks, and time spent in-app leads to more ad exposure, and thus more advertising dollars. There are cases when time spent and engagement can be valuable indicators (e.g. for content consumption), but somewhere down the line “engagement” became conflated with successful product experiences. In what seems to be an ironic (if not short-sighted) twist of fate, companies lost sight of user goals in favor of time spent, notifications and app opens, doing little to directly move the needle on meaningful engagement and long term retention. This may in part be due to seeking methods of fast revenue return for investors, but can be short-sighted to a detriment: moving the needle quickly may move it significantly less.
Most concerning perhaps, is that in our attention economy these goals turn into the effort of creating “sticky” or “addictive” apps, regardless of the impact they have on human attention and cognition. Often, these techniques “hijack psychological vulnerabilities” in an attempt to boost engagement. This comes at an increasingly evident cost — Harris shared it takes 23 minutes to refocus after an interruption, and recent research by the Harvard Business Review showed reduced cognitive capacity from just having your phone nearby. As designers and product leaders, we should take responsibility for this impact and work to change it.
How Designers Can Make a Difference
As a designer, your role sits at the intersection of product strategy and development. Through research and iteration, you’ve built a deep understanding of your users, and developed empathy for their needs and behaviors. If you haven’t yet, do the work to understand your business’s product strategy — this drives the work you and your team will do. You should understand the “why” behind having to work on a newsfeed over, for example, a better onboarding flow.
With this wealth of information, you are uniquely positioned to bring an insightful and compelling perspective to the metrics conversation. Talk to your Product Manager / Owner and ask them how they’re measured on the impact of your team’s work. Interview your higher level stakeholders, ask how they’re tracking feature, product, and team performance. If you find those metrics to be disparate from what you’ve identified in user needs, begin to consider what might be better, value-driven KPIs. At this point, you may find yourself a bit out of your comfort zone, and that’s okay — this is not a solo job. Here you can bring other designers and product folks into the conversation, brainstorm alternative metrics, and make a case for how those might be better indicators of success.
Better KPIs, Happier Teams: Bigger Impact
While working on design frameworks for new wearables at Fitbit, I helped our team frame metrics around health and wellness: fitness goals met, consistency, key biometric data moving to a healthy range, etc. These goals don’t just represent company values; they correlate with positive behavior change. They are derived from user and marketing research along with business goals, and are grounded in what motivates people to start their Fitbit journey and continue on it. In other words, they are value-driven.
This approach came with business and user impact, but it also brings a significant, internal outcome; it helps align teams towards impact, creates transparency, and inspires people to create better, more meaningful work. This benefit is compounded when teams can use those same KPIs to measure their own progress, creating a feedback cycle of valuable work to valued effort.
Advocate for KPIs that align with the value delivered to your business and your users
If I could leave you with one takeaway, it would be to fight for meaningful KPIs. If the core benefit of your product is aligned with its success metrics, better outcomes for your users (with the right support mechanisms) will mean better retention, and overall long-term success for your product, company, and users. Even more so, you’ll be able to work on more meaningful problems, help products be valued by the benefits they bring, protect users’ attention, and maybe, just maybe… even make the world a better place.
Analía is a Co-Founder and Principal at Glow Design ✨ a Product & UX Design studio in Brooklyn, NY. Have a project in mind? Say hi@glow.design
