What is success for a new feature’s design?

What does success look like?

In any good design team, that question immediately makes you think of metrics and data. You start to think about how your designs will change the data. This is great. For so long, designers have been ignorant to data and that was awful. We’ve started to succeed by speaking the language of business. But we’re missing something.

Recently, I noted my team has been having difficulty answering the success question. Being within an early-stage startup, most of our projects are focused on new features. In other words, we have no data to start with. No data makes it hard to determine what a successful measurement looks like. It’s a little easier to say your designs should increase or decrease X metric, like in the case of redesigns.

Have we forgotten how to design without data?

The best product managers and business stakeholders are always predicting business impact of effort with data.

In the case of a new feature, the prediction is often looking at what opportunity does this new feature create. Estimates are made for adoption. Often the argument is that having the feature is better than not having the feature.

From a design perspective, we’re not in the business of make something or making nothing. We are in the business of making the best version of something. So how can we determine success of our efforts, when the metrics are going to improve solely on the introduction of the feature?

Answer the how, with a goal.

If you can’t answer what your experience goals are, then you shouldn’t even worry about measurements.

A goal can’t be to eliminate the problem. A goal must tell you how you’re going to eliminate the problem. The goal should describe how you want your users to use your experience.

Think about the answers to these questions:

• What do you want the user to do?
• What do you want the user to understand?
• How do you want the user to feel?
• What do you want the user to achieve (their outcome)?
• What do you want to achieve for the business (business outcome)?

To create a goal, know the why.

The above questions should be directly related to what the user wants and expects from your experience. Remember to stay grounded in the user and not the business.

One way I do this is by creating an artifact I call Decisions | Factors Table. I’ll likely write more about this in the future but the gist is:

Example Decision | Factors Table

• Create a table of all the decisions the user has to make on their path to their desired outcome as columns in the table – write decisions as questions. (similar to thoughts on a journey map)
• Under each decision, document all the factors within the design that attribute to the user making that decision.
• Now ask yourself how the current experience is not streamlining the factors, or how there are factors not addressed, or how the current experience is suboptimally ordering the micro-decisions, or many more questions to critique your design in the context of answering the decision.
• Lastly, determine your goals from this artifact by determining your approach to answer these questions faster, easier, or eliminate them altogether. There can be many small goals.

Use your goals to guide your design decisions.