Measuring the impact of design
I’ve been talking about the measurable impact of design since my very first Nationwide project: ~Transform Replacement~.
We were able to convey the value of our work with some specific examples of increased efficiencies (e.g. saving 5 seconds on every click-path from a customer summary to a specific transaction - which, because of large usage volume, added up to the time of 25 FTE just from one set of UI changes (there were numerous others).
We also worked on removing avoidable errors, particularly around changes to personal details and addresses (which at the time was costing NBS £6.6m per year, with £4m of that attributed to errors and recovery from errors). Our work to make the flows more usable and forgiving was conservatively estimated to bring about a saving of £2m per year. The OMDC were also able to reuse our design work across a range of other colleague applications - using the same patterns and components. Whilst visiting the Bath branch on a recent research mission, I was pleased to see an ID scanning application that used our Transform Designs to good effect!
Still measuring today!
On a recent open banking project (with - Openwrks) we’ve been targeting reduced call time in Collections and Recovery as a specific metric of success. The more we can encourage members to self-service on preparation activities, the shorter (and more effective) our calls with them can be. I have used Impact Mapping with the team to flesh out a larger programme of work, beyond my initial engagement (there is lots to do!). Impact Mapping offers a great visual way to link all initiatives back to measurable business impacts - and is well worth exploring within the Experience Lead team. It lays out all assumptions and helps to explore multiple ways to achieve a goal (beyond the initial ideas).
Openwrks is currently in pilot, with the need to demonstrate value (realised and projected) in order to proceed to the next phase. I’ve been asked to bring senior leadership folks together to create a vision for self service in support of this (in August). We will work together on understanding what the future could bring us - which means capturing and articulating our core target values. Expanding on our hopes to simply reduce call time.
Destructive metrics
A year or so back, I arranged for Cennydd Bowles to give the UX and Research Team a master class in Practical Design Ethics. He shared the idea of Mutually Destructive Metrics - which has subsequently been used to formulate part of our thinking around quality measures. The idea is to target pairings of metrics that pull against one another. E.g. ‘speed of application flow’ vs ‘understanding what you’ve committed to’.I’m keen to explore this further as a key way to assert our distinctiveness in the financial sector.
What metrics might we think of to… build society, nationwide?