UX OKRs That Work: How to Set and Measure Achievable Design Goals

Did you ever design an elegant solution, only to see that users fail to perform simple tasks?

It occurs all the time. According to research by Nielsen Norman Group, a user can abandon a website within 10-20 seconds of visiting a page if it doesn’t deliver enough value right away.

This is why the goals of a UX team cannot be limited to designing wireframes and prototypes. UX OKRs allow tying the design process to real improvements in users’ behavior.

This article will explain how to set realistic UX OKRs and share practical UX goals examples that design teams can adapt. 

UX OKRs explained

UX OKRs enable design teams to enhance user experiences of the product, website or service.

A single OKR has two elements:

Objective: The desired improvement area.

Key Results: Quantifiable outcomes indicating progress toward the Objective.

For instance,

Objective: Improve the onboarding process for new users.

Key Results:

• Raise onboarding process completion rate from 62% to 82%.
• Reduce the duration of the onboarding process from 12 to 7 minutes.
• Lower onboarding-related customer support questions by 25%.

Objective provides the goal, whereas Key Results define success.

“Redesign onboarding screens” is a project.

“Increase onboarding process completion rate from 62% to 82%” is a Key Result.

Well-formulated UX OKRs concentrate on quantifiable changes in user behavior rather than completed design tasks.

Creating Realistic and Useful OKRs for Your Team

Useful UX OKRs must promote improvement without setting impossible expectations.

General objectives such as “Provide excellent user experience” are well-meant but too vague. A more specific Objective would be:

Enable new users to discover the basic value of the product sooner.

This provides designers, researchers, product managers, and engineers with a clear challenge.

Implementation of UX OKRs

1. Choose Important Objectives

Typically, I start by pinpointing areas that present the most friction in the user journey via:

• User interviews and usability testing
• Product analytics and session recordings
• Customer feedback and support questions
• Accessibility testing and product reviews

It is not about creating an OKR for every UX challenge. Rather, it is choosing one or two important objectives based on their impact, urgency, importance, and available resources.

An effective Objective describes the need for improvement, not how to improve UX.

Instead of:

Redesign the mobile checkout.

Use:

Create an enhanced and easier mobile checkout process.

It provides the sales team with a space to design, create content, conduct research, and develop technologies.

2. Set the Key Results

After setting the objective, it’s necessary to define the measurable results that will demonstrate the improvement in the user experience.

UX Key Results can include:

• Task completion and time on tasks
• Conversions and usage of features
• User satisfaction and efforts
• Support requests
• Accessibility and page performance
• Retention

Each Key Result should contain the baseline and the target when it’s possible.

Instead of: Improve checkout completion.

Use:

• Increase the mobile checkout completion from 54% to 68%.

The most useful UX goals examples combine behavioural, satisfaction, and friction-related measures to provide a complete view of progress. 

Objective: Assist users in finding and using reporting tools.

Key Results:

• Increase the creation of reports monthly from 35% to 55%.
• Increase the success rate of the tasks from 64% to 85%.
• Decrease the reporting support requests by 20%.
• Increase the ease of use from 3.4 to 4.2 out of 5 points.

3. Establish and Prioritize UX Projects

Once the Key Results have been set, look for the projects that will help to deliver them.

The projects for an onboarding Objective could be:

• Usability tests
• Omitting redundant form fields
• Clarifying instructions
• Progress bars
• Testing various onboarding paths

Prioritize UX projects in accordance with the impact, effort, urgency, and relevance to the Key Results of each project.

I like to ask myself just one question:

Which project would help me the most to move forward in terms of the target metric?

How to Measure UX OKRs

Formulating UX OKRs is just a beginning step. Team members should analyze them from time to time to identify whether their efforts positively affect the user experience.

1. Grade Key Results for Measuring Progress

It is possible to assess Key Results using a grade between 0.0 and 1.0:

0.0 – No progress

0.3 – Some progress

0.5 – Reached half of the goal

0.7 – Strong progress

1.0 – Met the target

For instance, when the task success rate has to grow from 60% to 80% and becomes 70%, it may be considered a 0.5-graded Key Result.

While grading shows how much teams have progressed, it is also useful to discuss what factors have positively/negatively affected the result.

2. Separate the Measurement of Goals From the Measurement of Work Progress

Two aspects are to be monitored by UX teams:

Outcome progress: Is the experience improving?

Work progress: Are the intended tasks executed?

For example, the project is 90% finished, but the corresponding Key Result is realized at 40%.

3. Apply Weights to Key Results that Matter

Not all Key Results might carry equal weight in achieving the objective.

For instance Objective: Make our onboarding more effective.

• Onboard to 80%, up from 60%—40%
• Bring down time to value delivery to one day from two days—30%
• Lower the number of onboarding support tickets by 25%—20%

Make the onboarding experience more satisfying for users, bringing up their score from 3.8 to 4.3—10%

Applying weights to your Key Results will give you a better picture of the big picture. The weights must be assigned at the time of OKR creation.

Using UX OKRs for Your Development Team

UX OKRs must drive day-to-day research, design, sprint planning, and product evaluation processes and not stay only within the scope of a quarterly OKR document.

Align UX OKRs with Product Goals

UX OKRs must help achieve the greater goals of the product.

For instance, if the company wants to reduce churn or increase trial-to-paid conversion rates, the UX OKR could be about onboarding, discovering features or increasing value.

It is necessary to demonstrate that a good UX is beneficial to product growth.

Identify the Base Metrics

First, identify your baseline before coming up with any targets.

If you don’t have a baseline, then you won’t be able to evaluate the success of an experience improvement effort. If there is no data available at all, the first thing to do is develop the metrics measurement system.

Integrate UX Research into the OKR Process

Research should inform the Objective, be used for project management, and provide validation of the results.

Use initial research to pinpoint the user problem, use usability testing to evaluate the solution, and conduct a follow-up study to measure the improvement.

The strongest user experience goals examples are grounded in research and reflect actual user behaviour rather than internal assumptions. 

Check Progress Together with Cross-Functional Teams

The success of UX often relies on collaboration between designers, engineers,  managers, marketers, and other teams interacting directly with customers.

Include Accessibility in Your Metrics for Success

Accessibility considerations must be included in your UX OKRs right from the start.

Some relevant key results may be:

• Fixing critical accessibility problems
• Better keyboard and screen reader success at completing tasks
• Increased compliance among priority journeys
• Inclusion of accessibility testing in design reviews

This makes your user experience goals examples more inclusive by considering the needs of a wider range of users. 

Use OKRs to Prioritize Requests

Clear OKRs will guide you when making decisions about priorities.

Every time there is something new, you should ask yourself whether it helps you achieve any Key Result, solve an important user problem, and positively influence any measurable result.

It will make your prioritization process more meaningful.

Learn from the Experience of Your Team

An incomplete key result does not necessarily mean that you did not succeed. Instead, it could mean that your assumption was wrong, there were dependencies or the metric itself was not suitable.

After each cycle, reflect on how things worked out and what should be done better next time.

In such a way, you will turn UX OKRs into a learning process rather than a scoring one.

UX OKR Examples for Boosting Your Team Performance

Below are practical UX goals examples that connect design efforts with measurable results. Adjust the targets according to your current data. 

Example 1: Enhancing Graphic Design Processes

Objective: Create a streamlined and replicable design process.

Key Results:

• Reduce the average design process duration to three days (down from five).
• Utilize templates for 85% of design projects (up from 55%).
• Reduce brand revisions by 40%.
• Score 4.3 out of 5 on a stakeholder satisfaction scale.

The OKR emphasizes faster, better, and consistent processes as opposed to making more designs

Example 2: Improving Website Performance

Objective: Improve the performance of the website to increase its speed and stability.

Key Results:

• Obtain great results in the Core Web Vitals metric in 75% of visits to priority pages.
• Lower Largest Contentful Paint to 2.5 seconds.
• Increase mobile conversion rate from 2.8% to 3.5%.

Web performance is an aspect of the UX that determines user behavior since poor web performance affects the user’s experience.

Example 3: Enhancing Usability and Accessibility of Website

Objective: To make the website more user-friendly and accessible.

Key Results:

• Improvement in navigation effectiveness rate from 68% to 88%.
• Reduction in time required for information search from 90 to 50 seconds.
• Solution to all critical accessibility problems.
• Increase in task completion using only the keyboard from 65% to 90%.

These examples of goals for improving user experience consider usability, accessibility, and behavior metrics all together instead of separately.

Example 4: Helping in the Successful Launch of the Feature

Objective: Assist the user in learning about the use of the new feature.

Key Results:

• A 40% adoption rate of the feature in eight weeks.
• Increase in the discovery rate of the feature from 25% to 60%.
• Helping 80% of the test users perform the primary task on their own.
• Getting a rating of 4.2 out of 5.

Launch success involves not only the timely launch of the feature but also whether the users have accessed and used it.

Thoughts About UX OKRs

A good set of UX OKRs will allow the team to know how much the product has been improved in terms of usability, speed, efficiency – not just the completion of the design work done.

The best UX goals examples focus on real user problems, measurable results, and projects that directly support those outcomes. In addition to that, UX OKRs provide design teams with additional means for prioritization, progress reviews and showing the impact of UX within the company.

When reviewing user experience goals examples, I recommend choosing focused Objectives, using credible baselines, and regularly checking whether the experience is improving. Above all else, it is important to see OKRs as a way of improving decision making.

This goal can be achieved using JOP as the tool to create, align and manage UX OKRs together with relevant projects and reviews.