Balance Scorecard Aligns User Experience Strategy with Corporate Objectives

With the Balance Scorecard system, an organization can align and manage its key corporate objectives. The User Experience Balance Scorecard maps the user experience process and skills to customer satisfaction and financial growth. At a high level, a User Experience Balance Scorecard might look something like that shown in Figure 2.

Figure 2—A high-level User Experience Balance Scorecard

PERSPECTIVE USER EXPERIENCE STRATEGY
FINANCIAL Increase revenue. | Reduce costs.
CUSTOMER Increase conversions, retention, and wallet share. | Reduce cycle time, training, and support.
PROCESS Create an attractive, friendly, and easy customer experience through research, iterative design, validation, and usability testing.
EMPLOYEE User Researcher | Information Architect | Visual Designer | Interaction Designer | Usability Engineer

 

Notice that the customer objectives of increasing conversions, retention, and wallet share map to increasing revenue and reduced cycle time; reducing training and support costs maps to the financial objectives of reducing costs. Depending on an organization’s overall strategy, you could break down the User Experience Balance Scorecard like that shown in Figure 3.

Figure 3—Objectives in a User Experience Balance Scorecard

PERSPECTIVE USER EXPERIENCE STRATEGY
FINANCIAL Enable revenue growth. Improve customer wallet share. Increase productivity.
CUSTOMER Establish product leadership and innovate through research and analysis of target-market segmentation to determine current needs and anticipate future needs. Improve customer intimacy through iterative design reviews with target customers. Improve quality of user experience.
PROCESS Research and analysis Interactive prototyping Usability evaluation
EMPLOYEE Research Analyst Information Architect, Visual Designer, and Interaction Designer Usability Engineer

Read entire article (link to article)