Erin Colbert

Metrics Driven Design

I just got back from SXSW and am still trying to digest the vast amounts of information I took in at the event. This was by far the best tech conference I have been to yet. My favorite presentation was Metrics Driven Design by Joshua Porter, the VP of Customer Experience at Performable.

He asked us to think about our existing design as a mountain. Currently, our design is on the corner of the mountain. With optimization, we can get to the top of the mountain, but there is another mountain in the distance. This mountain is much taller than the mountain we are on and is where we strive to be. We can only switch mountains by rethinking our existing design.

Optimization asks: what works best in the current model? Design innovation asks: what is the best possible model?

There are five types of metrics Porter points out that designers (and marketers for that matter) should be measuring and they relate to the usage lifecycle. These are mission critical for most SaaS companies and start with an interested user, moves to a trial/beta user, then a customer and finally a passionate customer. These metrics just measure how well you move people along the usage lifecycle.

1. Acquisition metrics - CPA (cost per acquisition), revenue by channel, revenue by keyword
2. Conversion metrics - trials / conversion rate, conversion funnel analysis
3. Engagement metrics - pageviews, unique visitors, returning visitors, registered users, time on site, daily active users, cohort analysis
4. Satisfaction metrics - net promoter score
5. Emergent metrics - a critical metric that, when achieved, drives a desired action (i.e. when a user adds 5 friends in FriendFeed they become an ‘active user’ or Blogger identifying their critical metric as the number of posts per user)

I’ve identified a few metrics that I’ll be working to implement at Codesion, primarily the net promoter score and trial to purchase cohort analysis by month. I’ll follow up with a detailed post on how I set these up in the coming months. Once I get a baseline, the goal is re-think design (both web and product) so we can move to the next mountain (hit escape velocity), instead of just inching our way up on the current mountain (through optimization). 

Already implemented these metrics? Share your tips in the comments.