Design Decisions Need Evidence, Not Opinions
Too often, design choices are defended with personal taste rather than data. Measuring the actual impact of design work is the only way to move beyond that. A new video course, “How To Measure UX and Design Impact”, put together by Vitaly Friedman, aims to give designers and managers the tools to track design success with concrete metrics.
The course covers the practical side of setting up UX scorecards, Design KPIs, and a full workflow for translating business goals into measurable design initiatives. It is available in two formats: a video-only option with 25 lessons (8 hours), or a bundle that adds live UX training sessions. Both come with a 100-day money-back guarantee and lifetime access to the materials.
Why Design Teams Struggle to Show Their Value
In many organizations, designers are seen as disruptors rather than enablers. They push back on established workflows, ask uncomfortable but necessary questions, and focus heavily on user needs — often at the expense of tight revenue timelines. That perception creates friction with the rest of the company.
Other departments — finance, marketing, HR, sales — typically have clear objectives, metrics, and KPIs they report on regularly. They are skilled at visualizing their contribution and making it visible across the organization. Design teams rarely have that same infrastructure. There is often no clear definition of what design success looks like, and little effort spent measuring the impact of work after it ships. That makes it difficult for the rest of the business to understand what designers contribute day to day.
Businesses want results: faster delivery, lower costs, new revenue streams, and steady growth. That pressure often casts designers in the role of “executors” — or worse, “pixel pushers” — rather than strategic partners. Without a way to demonstrate their influence on outcomes like revenue, customer loyalty, and support efficiency, designers remain vulnerable to that narrow view.
Turning Business Goals into Design Metrics
Friedman’s approach is to close that gap with a structured method for defining and reporting design value. The course focuses on practical steps: establishing team-specific design KPIs, tracking them consistently, assigning ownership, and embedding metrics into daily design processes. It also covers how to measure design systems and UX research as discrete contributors to business performance.
Beyond basic setup, the material walks through a range of established frameworks and methods: OKRs, Top Task Analysis, SUS, UMUX-Lite, UEQ, TPI, KPI trees, feedback scoring, gap analysis, and the Kano model. For each, the course explains what it is useful for and which UX research methods pair well with it to produce reliable insights.
Course Details and Pricing
The video course includes 25 chapters (8 hours), with content updated yearly, and is priced at $250.00 (down from $395.00). A Video + UX Training option is available for $495.00 (down from $799.00), adding live training sessions that run twice a year. The code SMASHING currently gives 20% off.
A free preview and full table of contents are available on the course page. The course also appears in a discounted UX Bundle alongside another video course.
Course Structure at a Glance
Vitaly Friedman's video course spans 25 chapters and roughly 8 hours of content, built around practical examples and hands-on exercises. The pacing is deliberately steady — covering one or two sessions per week is a reasonable rhythm. The curriculum runs from foundational business metrics to specialized techniques for reporting design success internally.
Business Metrics First
The early chapters ground designers in the language of business. You'll work through OKRs, KPIs, SMART goals, and the distinction between leading and lagging indicators. From there, the course walks through the metrics that typically populate executive dashboards: Monthly Active Users (MAU), Monthly and Annual Recurring Revenue (MRR/ARR), Customer Lifetime Value (CLV), and churn rate.
A significant portion addresses Net Promoter Score (NPS) — its widespread use, its statistical limitations, and the gap between what users say and what they actually do. The course pairs this with alternatives like Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT) and Customer Effort Score (CES), plus a feedback scoring method that turns qualitative input into quantifiable data for tracking UX improvements over time.
Design-Specific Measurement Tools
For product-level UX tracking, the curriculum covers established instruments in detail: task success rate, time on task, error rates and recovery, the System Usability Scale (SUS), and the Standardized User Experience Percentile Rank Questionnaire (SUPR-Q). Shorter options suitable for email surveys or in-app prompts — UMUX-Lite and the Single Ease Question (SEQ) — are presented alongside larger frameworks like the User Experience Questionnaire (UEQ) and Google's HEART model, with guidance on assembling everything into a product-specific UX scorecard.
Top tasks analysis gets dedicated attention as one of the most direct ways to measure UX: identifying representative tasks, testing with 15–18 users, and tracking success rates and time on task against an 80% success baseline. Survey design also receives a full chapter on avoiding bias, selecting sample sizes, and choosing question types and rating scales.
Enterprise and B2B Constraints
A dedicated chapter addresses the reality of measuring UX when users are hard to reach — due to NDAs, IP concerns, compliance, or simply high customer costs. The material covers stakeholder engagement, testing with proxies, and how to measure efficiency and failures in restrictive environments.
Building the KPI Tree
A core technique is the Design KPI tree, which visually connects user needs and research insights to design initiatives, then rolls those up into UX metrics and higher-level business KPIs. To feed that tree, the course introduces event storming — collaborative mapping of critical user success moments across the journey — and the Kano model for testing which design ideas will most effectively drive satisfaction and business impact.
The full design process is demonstrated end-to-end: run event storming, prioritize key events, ideate initiatives, stress-test them in an impact-effort matrix, and assign metrics that roll up into a coherent KPI tree. A chapter on metric selection weighs established instruments against custom definitions, balancing local impact (a specific change) against global impact (the entire journey).
Concrete examples span search quality for top queries, form error frequency and recovery, time-to-final-price in e-commerce, time-to-tier-boundaries in subscriptions, service desk inquiry rates, and even carbon emissions per page view.
Strategy, Reporting, and Maintenance
Establishing metrics requires organizational buy-in, so the course covers UX strategy: integrating measurements into existing workflows, defining cadence, and securing stakeholder approval. Reporting design success gets its own treatment — selecting tasks, recruiting participants, facilitating sessions, and turning observation data into compelling presentations for senior management.
To track progress over time, you'll learn to map four states against journey touch points: baseline (threshold not to cross), current state, target state, and industry benchmark. Design systems are measured beyond rollout speed — through relative adoption, efficiency gains, satisfaction scores, and how early designers involve the system in their conversations. UX research impact is tracked through outcomes, organizational learning, study reach, and research-initiated product changes.
The course closes on getting started: small pilot projects, realistic goals, and building a culture of measurement incrementally.
Who Should Take This Course
The material is built for advanced UX practitioners, design leaders, product managers, and UX researchers. If your day-to-day involves turning business goals into concrete design tasks, connecting business needs with user needs, or defending design decisions to stakeholders, this course gives you a practical framework for doing that with measurable evidence.
What You’ll Walk Away With
By the end of the video course, you’ll have a working toolbox of techniques and strategies to define, establish, sell, and measure design KPIs from start to finish. You’ll also know how to keep design work on the right trajectory by tracking its impact against business objectives. The curriculum covers:
- Translating business goals into UX initiatives
- Distinguishing OKRs, KPIs, and metrics
- Defining what design success means for your company
- Understanding which metrics and KPIs businesses typically measure
- Selecting the right set of metrics and KPIs for your context
- Establishing design KPIs that center on user needs
- Building a comprehensive design KPI tree
- Combining qualitative and quantitative insights
- Choosing and prioritizing design work based on evidence
- Tracking the impact of design work on business goals
- Explaining, visualizing, and defending design decisions
- Learning how companies define and track design KPIs in practice
- Building a strong case for adopting UX metrics in your organization
Course Formats and Pricing
Two purchasing options are available, with a 100-day money-back guarantee on both.
Video + Live UX Training
$495.00 (regularly $799.00) — includes 25 video lessons (8 hours) plus a live UX training session.
Video Only
$250.00 (regularly $395.00) — includes 25 video lessons (8 hours), updated yearly. Also available as part of a UX Bundle with two video courses.
