We live in a world that is focused on setting and achieving goals. While the world of design is creative, the business and “practical” side means that it’s not just about creating fabulous designs. It’s also about creating amazing designs that fill a business need.
With the subjective nature of design, it can be challenging to create individual and team OKRs successfully. Still, the OKR framework is an essential part of managing goals and growth within a company. Familiarizing yourself with OKRs, best practices, and reading some great examples of goals you can set on your own design team is a great way to get started with OKRs.
Design Team OKRs
OKR is an acronym for “objectives and key results,” and is based on a management system created by Intel’s former CEO Andy Grove. Design OKRs are specific to their design objectives and the results needed to meet those objectives or goals.
Objectives are the overall goal, or “what you want to achieve.” Like any practical goal, the objectives need to be achievable, but still challenging. They should also be time-bound, giving a specific deadline or timeline that they need to be completed on.
The KR, or key result, is “how you’ll measure your progress towards your objective.” Great key results are either measurable or trackable, and their completion should directly contribute to the success of the objective. It’s a best practice to have between three and five key results per objective. Together, your key results should undeniably fulfill your set objective.
Objective
Improve brand consistency through entire organization
Target Date: Annual-2021
Visibility: All Employees
Key Results
All design team team members are coached on new branding guidelines
Design LearningUpdate 15 landing pages with new branding guidelines
Update Landing PagesAll materials created for social media meet branding guidelines for 12 weeks
Branding GuidelinesDesign OKRs take the company objectives like building brand awareness, improving the customer experience, increasing sales to a membership program, and break them down into measurable outcomes that help guide work throughout the quarter to achieve the objective. For example, more key results that could contribute to building brand awareness include:
- Creating new branding guidelines
- Developing a media kit for the website based on the new guidelines
- Redesigning the company website with the new branding
- Developing social media templates for social media managers to use showcasing the new look
Design Team OKRs Best Practices
OKRs are developed based on a company’s vision, values, and strategy. Once business leaders understand what their most important goals are for a given quarter, they can share their top-level OKRs to help guide lower-level OKRs within departments and teams.
Businesses can write OKRs for individual company areas like the sales team, marketing department, or human resources department. Design teams must align with other departments and levels within the organization when creating their OKRs, because the trajectory of their work and their most important goals for the quarter will be informed by the needs of other departments.
One of the best ways to achieve success when creating OKRs is by focusing on the collaboration. OKRs are traditionally based on the bigger picture; the corporate or department goals, and not specific to the design team only. Designers must work together to create OKRs that address the needs of their department and the needs of the company as a whole.
Here are four key steps you can follow to create solid OKRs:
- Define the objective (based on personal, team-specific, or company-wide OKRs.)
- Choose 3 – 5 specific, measurable key results.
- Share the OKRs with the relevant personnel and teams.
- Keep track and report the progress weekly or monthly progress on achieving the OKRs.
OKRs by Department with Examples
Objective
Increase company brand recognition
Target Date: Q3-2021
Visibility: All Employees
Key Results
Increase pay-per-click free consultation calls scheduled by 15%
Pay-Per-ClickIncrease social media engagement by 10%
Social Media EngagementReceive and promote 4 positive reviews from high-profile customers
Positive ReviewsObjective
Improve overall product usability
Target Date: Q3-2021
Visibility: All Employees
Key Results
Increase core feature adoption rates by 3%
Core Feature AdoptionIncrease primary subscription retention rate by 30%
Retention RateDecrease number of support requests about feature use by 25%
Support RequestsOKRs for Individuals with Examples
Objective
Boost referrals from social media
Target Date: Q3-2021
Visibility: All Employees
Key Results
Increase number of bio link clicks by 3%
Number of bio linksIncrease free consultation appointments scheduled by 10%
Consultation AppointmentsDouble landing page click-throughs from boosted Facebook posts
Update Landing PagesObjective
Create a weekly newsletter for marketing leads
Target Date: Annual-2021
Visibility: All Employees
Key Results
Maintain an average click-through rate of 40% for each newsletter
Click-through RateConvert 15% of newsletters opened to free consultation appointments
Consultation AppointmentsMaintain at least 8% customer conversion rate for leads from newsletter free consultation appointments
Customer Conversion RateHow UX Designers Create OKRs
It can often be challenging to create OKRs. Ensuring that your Objectives are ambitious, yet focused, and your key results are outcomes rather than simply tasks to be completed can be difficult– especially for UX designers, who have project-driven workdays.
So how can UX designers create strong OKRs?
1. Identify your high-priority goal
In UX design, the first step to successfully creating OKRs is to identify your starting point. Design, especially UX design, isn’t as quantitative as other business areas, because design is inherently more subjective and project-based. Design projects are always one piece of a larger puzzle involving the products, company reputation, pricing, and much more.
This makes it challenging to define as a starting point; however, focusing on a single most important project, problem, or goal is the best place to start when creating OKRs.
2. Establishing The Results
Next, because milestones or key results need to be measurable, it’s crucial to clarify how these outcomes are measured. For example, the sales objective is to increase sales by 3% in the next quarter. Likewise, the UX design key results include reducing abandoned carts by 2.5% by creating a more user-friendly shopping cart experience. This key result ties it into a specific activity (updating the shopping cart experience) with an actual, measurable number found in real-life statistics. Ensuring key results are measured or tracked with quantitative metrics can help strengthen the quality of OKRs.
3. The Numbers
Lastly, reporting and providing feedback are part of the OKR process. At the time the OKRs are established, they are communicated to the affected team members. Then, as work continues, weekly check-ins carefully track progress, plans, and problems that teams might be facing while fulfilling a certain outcome.
UX designers must be able to connect their work directly with important key performance indicators (KPIs) so they know the extent of their impact. The key result metrics need to be relevant, clear, and easy to process.
Here’s an example of a UX design OKR
Objective
Improve User Experience
Target Date: Q3-2021
Visibility: All Employees
Key Results
Increase task success rate from 70% to 90%
Task Success RateAchieve system usability scale of at least 80 (with a min. of 10 participants)
System Usability ScaleAssess usability of product A
Usability StudyAdmittedly, transforming the unique world of design into specific, measurable objectives and key results is challenging for most designers. But with these best practices in place and examples to follow, it makes the design process easier to quantify and justify the impact of the design team on its bottom line.