Quantifying UX Success and Proving Value

UX Insights - User Experience Leadership and Strategy

Last week, I talked about building credibility by looking outside your organization for validation. External benchmarking, expert opinions, and industry recognition all help shift internal perception. But validation only works if people understand the actual value you're delivering. That brings us to today's topic: measuring and communicating UX success in ways that resonate with stakeholders.

Because, unless you can demonstrate value clearly, the rest of the organization won't recognize it.

Fortunately, decision makers across your company have an inherent need to improve the metrics they see. By establishing the right metrics, you'll influence their behavior. It's a weird phenomenon, but if you give people something to measure, they will want to improve that thing.

Two ways to quantify success

There are basically two ways to demonstrate the benefit of what you're doing.

Qualitative data can be incredibly powerful. A compelling story generates empathy among stakeholders in ways that raw numbers sometimes can't. Testimonials, videos, and user feedback help people understand the human impact of your work.

But quantitative data is even more powerful because people believe in hard numbers in a way they don't believe anything else. Ideally, this data should tie to some kind of financial return for the organization.

There is something about hard data and having hard numbers you can track that really resonates with people and makes them want to start moving that needle.

Deciding on your metrics

The first step is to have metrics based around organizational goals. Right back at the beginning of this course, I talked about getting that company strategy and identifying the organizational goals. Now we need to translate those into something measurable.

Depending on what kinds of products and digital services your organization offers will impact how you go about doing this. Essentially, you're taking the company objectives and translating those to the website, app, or digital service that you're running. For example, "increase revenue" might be a company goal for the year, so your website's role might be to generate more leads. Then you need to get specific about key performance indicators. What metric are we going to measure? Maybe we're measuring the number of people completing an online form or visiting a contact page. You need to make those metrics very tangible because otherwise, you can't track them easily.

Vary your metrics

However, be careful. Many organizations end up focusing on a single metric like conversion, which often ends up undermining their long-term success. For example, if you only care about conversion, you end up using pop-up overlays and attention-grabbing things, especially if you're thinking about conversion over the next quarter rather than longer term. You'll do anything to meet that target for that particular month. But what you're also doing is alienating people who won't come back because your website is hard to use or annoying.

It's much better to have a variety of metrics that you measure rather than focusing on just one area so that you approach things in a more rounded way.

I typically try to have metrics in three broad areas:

• Engagement metrics assess if users find your design delightful, if the content is interesting, and if it's relevant to their needs. You might put out a quarterly survey on the website or measure dwell time (although sometimes that can be a sign that people are lost on the website) or track how much of a video they watch.
• Usability metrics answer whether users can find answers to their questions and use features effectively. Periodic usability testing can bring those metrics in. You can measure things like task success rate, time to complete tasks, error rates, and the system usability scale I mentioned earlier.
• Conversion metrics show whether the right users take action on the site and what the financial value of those actions is. You've got the conversion rate, average order value, average lifetime value, number of repeat customers, and so on.

Tie metrics to dollar value

The most important thing is to try and tie these metrics to a dollar value if possible. Let me give you an example of how powerful this can be.

I was at a restaurant called Pizza Express here in the UK. My wife and I were sitting there when the server came over to take our order. However, they took forever to input the order into an iPhone app. I glanced at my wife, who immediately rolled her eyes at me because she knew exactly what I was thinking. That the app had a bad user experience and needed improvement. The server went away, and my poor wife had to listen to me go on about how annoying these apps can be. I then became obsessed and ruined our lunch by starting some calculations.

I calculated that if we could save 10 seconds per order, with about 350 orders placed per day in an average restaurant, that would save 58 minutes every day. Pizza Express is open about 364 days a year, meaning we could save 351 hours per year per restaurant. With 450 restaurants worldwide, that equates to nearly 158,000 hours that could be saved by fixing this app. According to ChatGPT, the average server in the UK earns about £9.90 per hour, so fixing the app could save the company over £1.5 million a year.

Now, you might think I made up these numbers, and that would be the kind of feedback you'd get if you did something similar. You're right. People will say the numbers are made up, and yes, I did make them up. But it shows the potential. You can use that as a case to run a proof of concept project to work out the real cost savings. It's okay to make educated guesses, and the power of linking a usability or user experience problem to a financial value cannot be overstated. That is where you'll really get people's attention and begin to show the organization the value you can provide.

If you want to make similar calculations, I've created a UX ROI calculator on my website that helps you work out the financial impact of UX improvements. Whether you're trying to increase your conversion rate, improve user retention and engagement, or boost productivity and efficiency, it walks you through the math and gives you numbers you can take to stakeholders.

Report your success

However, we can't just calculate these numbers. We also need to report them back. There are several techniques I use for demonstrating this value across the organization.

I use storytelling quite a lot. Creating an engaging story that demonstrates how UX enhancements can address issues and achieve measurable business results. That's where your qualitative feedback becomes valuable because you've got all these stories of different users and their experiences. I could have just given you the hard numbers about the Pizza Express example, but by telling you how I ruined our lunch and alienated my wife, I made that story more interesting.

I'm also a great fan of dashboards. Providing UX metrics in a dashboard will demonstrate how changes in the user experience help meet business objectives in a very tangible, visual way that people can instantly understand.

I also produce impact reports either quarterly, half-yearly, or annually which report back to the organization about the impact that user experience changes have had on the long-term goals of the business.

And then there are demos. Host demo days to showcase recent successes, what you changed, what it was like before and after, and the tangible difference that made.

Reporting success is really an important part of the equation, and that means you need to be measuring success and tying that back to a financial benefit if you possibly can.

Outie's Aside

If you're a freelancer or agency working with clients, demonstrating value becomes even more critical. Your client relationships depend on proving ROI.

When you start a project, agree on the metrics you'll track upfront. Don't wait until the end to figure out how you'll demonstrate success. Build measurement into your proposal. If your client says "increase conversions," get specific about which conversions, by how much, and over what timeframe.

Document the baseline before you start work. Take screenshots, record the current metrics, and note the user complaints. This gives you a clear before state to compare against.

During the project, create a simple dashboard that your client can check anytime. Share wins as they happen. Don't save everything for the final report.

When you're calculating potential value, be conservative. Underpromise and overdeliver. If your rough calculation suggests £100,000 in savings, present it as "potentially £50,000 or more." This protects you from overpromising while still showing meaningful impact.

Finally, make your impact reports visual. Before-and-after screenshots, simple charts showing metric improvements, and short video clips of users struggling with the old design versus succeeding with the new one. These make your case far more compelling than a spreadsheet full of numbers.

So that is it for this time. Next week, I'll wrap up this course with some final thoughts and a summary of everything we've covered. I'll pull together the key lessons and give you a framework for moving forward with confidence.