UX Leaders’ Getting a Seat at the Top Table

Calculating a QXscore can make it easy for business leaders to evaluate the performance of the user experience of their organization’s digital properties and for digital-experience stakeholders to demonstrate the impact of their user experience and identify opportunities to improve it. You can share this single user experience score with your product teams and stakeholders, enabling them to measure the user experience quantitatively. By consistently measuring this QXscore, your organization can easily understand its digital experience at a glance.

Measuring the Performance of UX Leaders

McKinsey also reported that only a third of CEOs and their direct reports could confidently state the accountability of their head of design. This data could provide an untapped opportunity for design leaders.

We recommend that, when measuring a digital user experience, you start at the heart of an organization. Answer these questions:

1. How are your organization’s executives measured?
2. What are your organization’s broader business objectives?

If you have a deep understanding of your key executives’ ambitions and desires, you can tie UX metrics to them.

Here are some examples of companies who have measured the performance of their user experience, connected their performance with business outcomes, and gotten a seat at the top table:

• Kimberly-Clark—By benchmarking their user-research efforts using a single UX score, the company was able to report a 19% improvement in its task-success rate and a 36% decrease in the time users spent on task,
• Kroger—They know they’re building the right solution because they conduct UX research early in the product-development lifecycle.
• H&M—This company conducts UX research at every stage of development, and they’ve increased their conversions by 4% and reduced time on task by 84%.
• Adobe—They embed UX metrics in their performance reviews.

Our UX Measurement Checklist

To get the most out of User Experience and make it work for your organization, we recommend this UX measurement checklist, which we’ve organized into three easy to follow steps:

• Step 1: Activate:
  
  • Identify what matters most to your executives.
  • Identify a pilot project focusing on a specific user journey.
  • Try to connect UX metrics to the business metrics.
• Step 2: Ignite:
  
  • Know the QXscore for your digital experiences and your competitors’ as well.
  • Educate your colleagues on your QXscore and build trust internally.
  • Prioritize improvements with stakeholders, then test, iterate, and benchmark the results.
• Step 3: Drive:
  
  • Visualize, track, and share progress regularly.
  • Embed QXscores into team performance reviews.
  • Tell inspiring stories regularly.

Conclusion

Of course, using QXscores to get a seat at the top table is easier said than done. So we recommend that you start small, by using Step 1 to establish trust. Testing, learning, and iterating on designs tend to be core elements of UX research and design. But taking just the first steps is not enough to get a seat at the top table. Conducting up-front discovery research to influence product roadmaps and measuring performance are critical to getting that elusive seat. This makes sound business sense, too.