Demonstrating UX Value: Calculating ROI to Secure Funding for Design Projects (Full Transcript)

Speaker 1: As UX professionals, we see inherent value in improving the experiences of products and services. But, not everyone sees it that way. And sometimes, the people who don't see it that way are also the people who are making decisions about your funding. If you need to demonstrate the value of your design efforts, one of the most effective methods is to calculate your return on investment. Essentially, you need to show how your design changes impact the bottom line—revenue, cost savings, or another key performance indicator. I'll walk you through the four steps of calculating ROI. The first step is to collect your UX metric—some measurable aspect of the user experience. Most often, these come from surveys, analytics, quantitative usability testing, or customer support. For example, let's imagine that we're working on this health insurance website. We're working on the registration process for online accounts for our health insurance policyholders. We know from qualitative research that people often struggle to register for their accounts. There are lots of things that we could measure for this task. We could get the success rate from quantitative usability testing, or the completion rate from analytics. If we conducted a survey, we could find out the average ease-of-use rating for this task. Or we could look at how many people are contacting customer support about registration. The second step is to choose a KPI. This should be something that your company cares a lot about. Often it's something like profit or cost, but it's not always about money. It could be something like employee productivity or donors. Think, what are the metrics that everyone—not just the design team—pays attention to? Once you've identified your KPI, you can move on to step 3—converting the UX metric into the KPI. This step is a lot like converting units—like converting liters to gallons. We just have to figure out the conversion ratio. Sometimes this step is pretty easy, but sometimes it isn't. Let's go back to our health insurance site example, and imagine that we picked support tickets as our UX metric, and cost savings as our KPI. So let's say that we had 23,000 tickets for registration in the month before the redesign. Our design improvements fixed some glaring usability issues and made the process much smoother so people can now easily complete the task on their own. So we have 1,100 tickets in the month after the redesign. That's a ticket reduction of $21,900. Let's also say that the cost per ticket is $6. That's the average cost of the customer support personnel's time to resolve one ticket. We'll just multiply $21,900 by the cost per ticket to get our projected monthly cost savings of $131,400. The final step is to report your calculations responsibly. That means that you should make it clear to your audience that these are estimates, not exact financial calculations. Make sure that your audience understands where your numbers came from—that'll be useful in setting expectations, but also in backing up your calculations' credibility.