How to define and measure human and commercial impact
Working in consulting I'm often faced with the perceived tension between making better experience for users, and wanting to increase the profitability of a product or service.
What is often misunderstood is that the two are not mutually exclusive, as when you deliver impact for users, it generally delivers a positive impact for the business.
But, designers often struggle with explaining this.
About 2 years ago, a colleague and I looked to create a suite of frameworks and tools to help them have conversations around impact, which after being used across the business globally for sometime, I though I'd share in a bid to help others.
We can't give away all of our secrets, but I thought I'd share a simple equation we created to breakdown how to think about what drives human and business impact.
Let's start with human impact
We simplified the way you can drive human impact into two key drivers; emotional and functional:
emotional drivers are those that shape the way the people feel
functional drivers are those that drive certain actions
And now for business impact
Commercial success can be boiled down into actions that drive growth and those that drive efficiency:
growth drivers are actions that allow you to make more money
efficiency drivers are actions that help you save money
How to measure the impact of each driver
When measuring the success of human and business drivers, you need to consider:
the degree of change - comparing the current result to the baseline
the volume of change - looking at how many people you were able to affect
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To help put this in context, here's a cheat sheet (non-exhaustive) with some examples of human and business impact drivers:
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So when should you use this?
At the start of a project, to help frame what good looks like and start to craft some ingoing hypothesises around the experience you're looking to create for key stakeholders such as employees, customers and shareholders
During the project, to re-frame the challenge once you've got greater context around the business and user needs you want to solve for
After the project, to summarise and communicate what you were able to achieve