What Are the Key Metrics Used to Evaluate the Success of Contextual Design?

Success of Contextual Design

Many products are launched with a set of key performance indicators (KPIs) in mind, including metrics for things like completion rates and efficiency. These KPIs guide product leaders in making business decisions and assessing their impact on users, customers, and the bottom line. But which metrics are the most valuable?

Choosing the right UX KPIs is an ongoing exercise that requires careful consideration of user and business goals. Ultimately, it’s important for design leaders to collaborate with their adjacent business leaders to ensure that the metrics they choose are easily understandable and contextually relevant.

The Contextual Design process offers a structure for this translation, which can make it easier for teams to communicate their ideas and build buy-in among stakeholders and executives. At one consumer-goods company, for example, the chief design officer worked alongside leaders from research and development, finance, and marketing to develop a set of metrics that weighed financial viability and technical feasibility against anticipated desirability.

What Are the Key Metrics Used to Evaluate the Success of Contextual Design?

For a design team to succeed, it must have the ability to translate user needs into a product vision and requirements. To do this, it is essential to know how people work on a day-to-day basis. Unfortunately, work practice is tacit, and people are often unaware of their own behavior. This is why Contextual Design uses field interviews to reveal the work practices of end-users by conducting one-on-one observation and discussion with them in their normal context of use.

These interviews do not simply ask questions about how a user is doing, but rather focus on exploring the motivations and strategies that underlie their behavior. During the interview, the designer also examines their work artifacts, such as notebooks and physical tools, to gain a deeper understanding of what they are doing. The resulting models are then used to drive conversations that explore how technology can be used to transform the users’ work.

The team’s high-level design response to the users’ needs is captured in a Visioning workshop, where they can explore the transformations that might be possible with a new system. Using the consolidated data from the interviews, they can develop and prototype ideas to improve the way the product works. For instance, they might create a new UI to better support the workflow of the users’ job, or they might design new business processes that will streamline those tasks.

To evaluate the success of a Contextual Design project, the most important metric is user satisfaction. This is commonly measured by net promoter scores, which are based on survey responses asking users how likely they are to recommend the product to a friend or colleague. This metric is easy to collect, relatively inexpensive, and highly indicative of the strength of a brand’s customer loyalty. It is also a good proxy for overall user experience. However, this metric does not capture the nuances of how a product feels to use or whether it is enjoyable to do so. It does not provide insight into what is working and what is not, and how to change it.