3 Simple Ways to Measure Design Impact

#024: Why design’s value is best proven through experiments, insights, and engagement.

Conversations about measuring the impact of design often drift into hand-wringing: it’s difficult, it’s mostly qualitative, it can’t be tied back to outcomes.

I don’t buy that.

The problem isn’t that design impact is hard to measure — it’s that too many people don’t understand how design connects directly to business results. They see design as decoration on top of the “real” drivers of growth, when in reality it’s the discipline best positioned to change user behavior in ways that move the business forward.

Here’s the truth: design impact is measured the same way everything else is — by how it changes user behavior.

That’s it. And there are three primary ways to do it:

1. Through live experimentation.

2. Through insights generated in 0-to-1 work.

3. Through visual and brand design that amplifies engagement.

If your design team isn’t focused on these levers, you’re leaving massive value on the table and are left wide open to being cut in what is an increasingly volatile economy.

1. Live Experimentation (Driving the Bottom Line)

The most direct way to measure design’s impact is experimentation: launching variations, observing how customers behave differently, and tying those behaviors to business outcomes.

This isn’t about “delight.” It’s about conversion, retention, frequency, and order value — the levers that decide whether the business grows or stalls.

Building an Experimentation Culture in Design

Too many design teams wait for PMs or data scientists to “invite” them into an experiment. That’s backwards. Design should own experimentation.

• Keep an Experimentation Backlog. Every design team should maintain a backlog of hypotheses ready to test. In e-commerce, that might include streamlining checkout fields, reworking promo placements, or designing new recommendation modules.

• Frame Hypotheses in Customer and Business Terms. Not “redesign the form,” but: “If we reduce form fields from 12 to 6, we expect to see a 5% increase in completed orders.”

• Advocate Relentlessly. From leaders to ICs, designers should be pushing these experiments into product roadmaps. If that’s not happening, let’s be blunt: you might as well not have design on optimization teams. Without experimentation, you’re just styling pixels and are unnecessary overhead.

Design as Experiment Velocity

Design isn’t just a participant in experiments — it’s the engine that makes them possible. A strong design system makes it easier to spin up test-ready variations. A thoughtful designer can frame sharper hypotheses than anyone else, because they’re the ones who understand both user needs and business goals.

2. 0-to-1 Work (De-Risking Bets)

But what about ideas that aren’t in production yet? This is where design proves its worth through insight generation.

The Real Value of Prototypes

Design should be brought in at the earliest stage of a bet, not after requirements are written. Why? Because design artifacts — sketches, flows, prototypes — make abstract ideas testable.

Put a prototype in front of a customer and you’ll see behaviors that either validate or invalidate the direction. Every one of those behavioral insights de-risks the investment.

Contrast that with attitudinal research — surveys, interviews, focus groups — which are notoriously unreliable. Decades of behavioral science back this up: people are terrible at predicting their own future behavior (Nisbett & Wilson, 1977; Baumeister et al., 2007). But prototypes cut through the noise by showing you what people actually do.

Insights as a KPI

Instead of just counting screens delivered, design leaders should be counting insights generated per quarter. Better yet, track your kill rate — the percentage of bets killed or redirected due to those insights.

A healthy kill rate isn’t a failure. It’s proof your design team is saving millions in wasted development. Example: testing five prototypes, killing two, and pivoting one more could easily prevent $3M in wasted build costs. That’s design ROI in action.

The Spectrum of Fidelity

• Low-fi sketches: validate concepts cheaply.

• Mid-fi click-throughs: validate flows.

• High-fi prototypes: validate interactions and messaging.

Each level unlocks insights earlier, faster, and cheaper than waiting for code.

3. Visual & Brand Design (Amplifying Engagement)

Now, you might be thinking this whole approach suggests I care little about visual design. Not true. High-quality, inspiring visual design has direct, measurable impact — when deployed strategically.

Take e-commerce: engrossing visual creative and storytelling drive scroll depth and engagement, which directly correlate to more time spent, more products seen, and ultimately, more revenue.

This isn’t abstract. Target’s mobile app has leaned into this heavily. By fixing the search bar at the bottom of the screen and enlarging promotional tiles and grids, they’ve created a more immersive, visually-driven experience. The effect? More people browse deeper into the app — and buy more.

I’ve seen this firsthand in my own career. When visual design raises the floor of engagement, business outcomes follow. Promotional content gets more interaction. Shoppers spend more time with products. Pages convert at a higher rate.

In other words: visual design changes behavior too.

The mistake many orgs make is treating visual/brand design as “aesthetic garnish.” When in reality, it’s a lever that shapes engagement, and engagement is measurable.

Metrics to Track

• Scroll depth

• Dwell time on key pages

• Click-through rate on visual modules

• Product views per session

• Revenue per visitor

Visual design is not separate from impact — it’s an amplifier. When executed with intent, it fuels the behaviors experimentation and insights are meant to drive.

With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility

But there’s a catch. If design’s power lies in shaping behavior, then with great power comes great responsibility.

The same design choices that can help customers and businesses win together can also be twisted to favor the business at the user’s expense. I’ve seen it firsthand. Earlier in my career, working inside a financial institution, I was pressured to design flows that nudged customers into less favorable options simply because they were more profitable.

This is the shadow side of impact: when design is reduced to manipulation rather than empowerment.

It’s why experimentation needs ethical guardrails. It’s why insights shouldn’t just validate the executive’s pet idea but ensure it truly solves a customer need. And it’s why visual design should aim to inspire and guide, not overwhelm or mislead.

If we’re going to measure design by the behaviors it drives, then we also have to ask: whose interests are those behaviors serving? The best design outcomes balance both — delivering value to the customer and to the business. Anything else is short-term thinking disguised as growth.

Framing for Leaders

When you’re talking to executives, put it in their language:

• Customer Impact: friction reduced, tasks completed.

• Business Impact: conversion, retention, revenue.

• Organizational Impact: faster delivery, less rework, more alignment.

Then hammer this home: the three most defensible, bottom-line-tied ways to measure design are experimentation (behavior change post-launch), insights (behavioral learnings pre-launch), and visual design (engagement that amplifies growth). But the responsibility is just as important as the results.

The Bottom Line

Measuring design impact isn’t complicated. It’s either:

1. Did the thing we shipped change behavior in a way that moved the business forward?

2. Did the prototypes we tested generate insights that improved decisions — including the decision not to build?

3. Did the visual and brand design amplify engagement in ways that drove revenue?

That’s it. Three levers. All critical. All uniquely enabled by design.

But remember: design doesn’t just measure impact, it shapes it. And the responsibility is to use that power to build outcomes where customers and businesses both win.

So the next time someone says design impact is “hard to measure,” tell them this: only if you’re looking in the wrong places.

In closing, if you want your team to be indispensable consider these tenets:

• If your design team isn’t advocating experiments, you don’t have a design team — you have a styling team.

• If your 0-to-1 work isn’t generating behavioral insights, you’re not de-risking — you’re decorating PowerPoints.

• If your visual design isn’t moving the needle on engagement, you’re painting, not designing.

• If your design impact comes at the customer’s expense, it’s not design — it’s exploitation.