52: How Outdated Metrics Hold Design Back—and What to Use Instead

The Invisible Dashboard That’s Limiting Your Design Impact

A photorealistic illustration shows a magnifying glass highlighting financial charts, graphs, and binary code. Triangular segments in the background depict data patterns, symbolizing analysis, insight, and growth. Image generated using AI with DALL·E—prompt and edits by the author.

Every design organization inherits metrics that, once validated, have their value, but now constrain its growth.

You know the dashboard I’m talking about: filled with adoption rates someone once fought to establish, usability scores that once saved a launch, and task completion rates that made perfect sense three pivots ago. Someone still updates it weekly. No one questions it. Until suddenly, it’s not just outdated—it’s actively misguiding your strategy.

As I explored in my previous framework for meaningful metrics, successful design organizations measure across behavioral, strategic, and emotional dimensions. But here’s what I didn’t address: the most challenging part of evolving your design measurement isn’t identifying what to track next—it’s letting go of what no longer drives the outcomes that matter to your business.

The Design Metrics We Inherit

Every design metric tells a story—of a design leader who needed to prove ROI, a usability crisis that demanded measurement, or a product launch that required specific success criteria. But as your product matures and user needs evolve, the context shifts. Your design organization grows. Business priorities change. User behaviors become more sophisticated. And yet, the metrics stay.

We hold on because:

• They feel familiar and “scientific"

• They ladder up to the executive expectations we helped set

• They provide comfort in ambiguous creative work

• They make our design impact look quantifiable and impressive

But letting go of a design metric forces uncomfortable questions: What does design success look like now? How do we prove value in this new context? Most challenging of all, what if our current measurement approach prevents us from having a greater impact?

When Design Metrics Become Strategic Liabilities

You know a design metric has outlived its strategic usefulness when:

• It’s being reported, but design decisions are not being informed. If your leadership team sees the identical UX scores monthly and nothing changes in your design approach, it’s organizational theater, not strategic insight.

• It measures design activity, not design outcomes. While “Component library usage” or “design reviews completed” discuss process compliance, they say nothing about user problem resolution, experience quality, or business impact—the strategic metrics that drive organizational success.

• It anchors your design strategy to past business models. This is the most insidious trap, and it often manifests in what I call “The Executive Summary Trap”—reducing complex user experiences to single scores that once mattered but no longer predict the outcomes your business needs.

• It creates false confidence in design performance. When your metrics show green while user satisfaction, retention, or conversion stagnate, you measure the wrong things and make strategic decisions based on incomplete pictures.

Case Study: When User Experience Metrics Stop Reflecting User Value

Consider a fintech company that initially built its design measurement around a single core use case—peer-to-peer payments. The design team focused on traditional UX metrics: task completion rates, time-to-complete transactions, and usability scores around money transfers. These metrics helped optimize the core experience and proved the design’s impact on user efficiency.

But as the company expanded into comprehensive financial services—direct deposit, savings features, credit products, and spending insights—the legacy UX metrics began telling an increasingly incomplete story.

High task completion rates for individual features didn’t indicate whether users understood the platform as a comprehensive financial solution. The behavioral metrics showed efficiency but missed the strategic impact on customer lifetime value. Efficient transaction flows didn’t predict whether people trusted the company with their primary banking relationship—a critical emotional metric for financial services success. Traditional usability metrics measured feature adoption but missed the more profound behavioral shifts required for financial services engagement.

To design for this evolved business model, the team had to fundamentally rebuild their measurement approach using what I call the three-lens framework: shifting from measuring discrete task efficiency (behavioral metrics) to tracking financial behavior integration (strategic metrics), from feature-specific usability to holistic financial confidence (emotional metrics), from transaction completion to long-term financial relationship indicators.

This wasn’t just a metrics update—it was a strategic design pivot that required letting go of measurement systems that had previously defined the company’s success story.

The Strategic Cost of Measurement Inertia

For design executives, outdated metrics aren’t just data hygiene problems—they’re strategic risks that compound over time:

• Resource misallocation: Teams optimize for metrics that no longer predict business outcomes, wasting design capacity on improvements that don’t move the needle.

• Stakeholder misalignment: Design loses credibility and strategic influence in executive discussions when design metrics don’t connect to current business priorities.

• Innovation suppression: Legacy metrics often reward incremental improvements over breakthrough thinking, constraining your team’s ability to drive transformational user experiences. This is what I’ve previously called “The Usability Success Ceiling”—optimizing only for task completion while ignoring emotional resonance and long-term value creation.

• Competitive blindness: Measuring yesterday’s success criteria prevents you from seeing today’s competitive advantages and tomorrow’s user expectations.

Redefining Success: The Leadership Work of Letting Go

Evolving design measurement requires more than analytical rigor—it demands organizational courage and strategic vision. This builds on what I’ve called the leadership testing framework: creating systematic improvement processes that drive action, not just generate data. In my experience, design teams rarely struggle due to a lack of data. They struggle from a lack of permission to question success as it’s currently defined.

Here’s how to lead this transformation:

1. Conduct a Strategic Design Measurement Audit

Start with these executive-level questions:

• What design metrics do we track because “we always have”?

• Which metrics influence our design strategy and resource allocation?

• Are we measuring the design’s impact on current business priorities?

• What user and business outcomes do our design metrics fail to predict?

Categorize each current metric:

Keep: Metrics that still predict user satisfaction and business outcomes—your foundational behavioral and strategic indicators
Evolve: Metrics that need deeper behavioral context or stronger business connection—often these need to shift from single-lens to multi-lens measurement
Replace: Activity metrics that don’t capture design’s strategic impact—the vanity metrics that feel comfortable but don’t drive decisions
Add: Missing emotional metrics that capture the design’s contribution to brand equity, trust, and long-term competitive advantage

2. Build the Business Case for Measurement Change

Before retiring familiar design metrics, create a compelling narrative about what’s shifting in your market, user expectations, and business model—frame measurement evolution as strategic adaptation, not performance critique.

Connect new measurement approaches directly to business outcomes your executives care about: customer lifetime value, market differentiation, competitive advantage, and growth sustainability.

3. Co-Create Measurement Strategy with Cross-Functional Leadership

Don’t develop new design metrics in isolation. This connects directly to building cross-functional measurement alignment—bringing together product, engineering, marketing, and business stakeholders to define success collaboratively.

Ask each function: What questions about design impact do you need answered to make better strategic decisions? What design outcomes influence your team’s ability to deliver business results?

When leadership teams co-author a design measurement strategy, they’re far more likely to trust and act on design insights.

4. Establish Measurement Evolution as Ongoing Strategic Practice

Build quarterly measurement reviews into your leadership rhythm—“decision thresholds” for your key metrics. Ask:

• Are our design metrics still predicting the most important outcomes for our business?

• What user behaviors or business results are we missing because of measurement gaps?

• How should our measurement approach evolve as our product and market mature?

5. Connect Design Metrics to Executive Decision-Making

The ultimate test of design measurement isn’t analytical sophistication—it’s strategic utility. This echoes what I’ve emphasized about moving from measurement to movement: the best metrics don’t just measure success, they create the conditions for it. Ensure your design metrics directly inform decisions about resource allocation, product strategy, user experience investments, and competitive positioning.

If your design metrics aren’t influencing executive-level decisions about where to invest in user experience, they’re not strategic enough.

Legacy Isn’t the Enemy—Strategic Drift Is

Not all established design metrics are outdated. Some are enduringly valuable, even foundational to your design practice. But others are artifacts of previous strategies, markets, or organizational phases.

The key is knowing which is which—and having the organizational courage to evolve measurement systems as your design impact requirements change.

Design measurement must evolve during rapid business change—new markets, business models, competitive landscapes, and user expectations. It must reflect where your design organization has been successful and where it needs to drive future value.

The Executive Imperative: Building Measurement Capability

Letting go of legacy design metrics isn’t just operational optimization—strategic leadership determines whether your design organization drives business results or measures design activity.

This connects to the broader challenge I’ve explored: building organizational measurement capability that serves three critical leadership functions—proving design’s strategic value, aligning cross-functional teams, and driving better decision-making at scale.

In a landscape where user experience increasingly determines competitive advantage, the metrics guiding your design strategy must be as sophisticated and adaptive as the experiences you create.

The question isn’t whether your design metrics are accurate—it’s whether they’re strategically relevant to the outcomes your business needs most.

Reflection for Design Leaders

What’s one design metric your team still tracks religiously, but no longer influences decisions, or reflects the impact design can truly have?

What would it take to replace it with a measurement that better predicts the user and business outcomes that matter most?

And more importantly: what would your team unlock if you did?

Read more by the author on this topic:
51: Measuring What’s Next: Designing Metrics for Innovation, AI, and Emerging Experiences: How to evaluate design success when you’re building the future, not the present

36: Beyond the Dashboard: A Design Leader’s Framework for Meaningful Metrics: A Playbook for Impactful, Insightful, and Human-Centered Product Design

28 Proving UX Impact Without Hard Numbers: How to Showcase UX Success Without Traditional Metrics