Read time: 3 minutes

The baton is yours, designer

You may be measuring the success of your design and still not get buy-in. Well, this is likely because you’re not communicating the impact of your designs in a way that the leadership understands. Even if you have buy-in, it’s important to evangelize the impact of our designs so that design continues to have a seat at the table.

You may think you’re “not a math person.” Well, if that’s the case, today is the day you become one! Relax, it will be easier than you think. 😜

Steps for measuring ROI

1. Define a business lever based on what you are trying to accomplish (think KPI).
2. Estimate the financial impact.
3. Communicate with a hypotheses.
4. Measure and share outcomes.🎯

1. Define a business lever

Generally speaking, we may think of design impact as:

• increased revenue
• decreased spending
• increased efficiency
• Increased conversion rates
• increased customer satisfaction
• Reduced development costs
• Lower support cost
• increased brand recognition/customer loyalty

When measuring the ROI of design, it's important to have clear goals and metrics in place. This will help you determine the success of the design investment and make data-driven decisions.

Part of defining means you need to measure where this metric is currently at in order to understand what impact your design has had. Ways to measure could be quantitative or qualitative.

• Analytics
• Surveys or questionnaires
• Quantitative usability testing
• Customer support metrics

 Image from Nielsen Norman Group

2. Estimate financial impact

This is where the math comes in. Once you’ve defined your KPI, you’ll want to tie it to costs to clearly communicate the impact.

Let's say leadership isn't prioritizing a design system (a very unusual scenario 😄). Well, maybe you haven't highlighted the cost savings for the company.

Freeing up designers to spend more time on matters of impact and less time recreating components is an obvious benefit to designers.

Decrease time spent designing = more time spent on things that matter + cost savings for company

Designer hourly fee: $100

No. of designers: 5

Time reduction: 50%

Time spent creating from scratch: 100h

Annual Savings w/ design system: $150,000

Often it's just about meeting people in their own language. Money talks.🤑

3. Communicate with a hypothesis

You should be doing this for every project. Have a clear intent on:

• what the goal is
• why your approach will accomplish it
• what the intended outcome is (this is where your financial impact estimate comes in)

I made a detailed post about how to write a hypothesis on Linkedin if you need guidance. You can also watch the video on Tiktok.

4. Measure and share outcomes

Once you release your design, measure the actual impact as compared to the intended impact. Perhaps you had a goal to decrease onboarding time by 10% or decrease time spent creating components by 70%. If you measure the impact and didn’t see the desired change, you may need to go back to analysis and iterate. Once you achieve a more conclusive result, you’ll want to share the win with your team. Even if you weren’t able to hit the goal you had and you still increased team efficiency or customer satisfaction, that speaks positively about the impact.

“A win is a win.”

What do you think? Can you share an experience below where you quantified impact to get buy-in from leadership?

Watch a video on how to measure ROI

Sera Tajima

Founder, The Craft

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