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How to Set Web Design OKRs: Best Practices and Examples

OKR (Objectives and Key Results) is a strategic management methodology that allows synchronizing the team’s goals with individual goals. This is to say, OKRs make sure that everybody in your company is working towards the same result. And since your website is pretty much your company’s face, it is important to implement the Web Design OKRs early on.

How does the OKR method work?

To begin with, it is necessary to highlight two key components of OKR: the main goal (an Objective) and key indicators that bring us closer to achieving this goal (Key Results).

The main Objective may be abstract and act as an overall vector, but your Key Results must contain hard figures, numbers, or other quantifiable completion metrics. To establish a goal and key indicators for achieving it, you might want to ask yourself several questions:

  • What do we want to achieve? Consider the overall goal for your entire company, a team, or the unit you are responsible for. It should be an overarching goal that defines your next quarter’s purpose. Once you can answer this question, consider the answer as your Objective.
  • How will we measure our success? An Objective is nice, but you should be able to measure your progress toward it. For example, if your Objective is to improve the company website’s responsiveness, your Key Results could be measured in milliseconds to load the page.

Also, feel free to be as ambitious as you can — Key Results are meant to be almost unreachable and drive you toward new approaches. Remember, OKRs are not KPIs, and using them as such will lead to a disaster.

In this article, we will focus on OKRs for your Web Design team and break down the best practices and examples. We already have similar articles on Engineering OKRs, Marketing OKRs, Finance OKRs, and Sales OKRs — so feel free to reference them if you are interested in company-wide OKR adoption. And if you need a reminder on the basics of OKRs, we’ve got a terrific 17-minute video that covers everything you need to know.

OKRs in the Design Process

Design is not quite the subject you imagine when it comes to OKRs — the field is heavily Objective-based and exists in synergy with marketing and front-end development. This means that design OKRs are often part of a larger OKR structure, which reduces them to being Key Results instead of full-blown Objectives.

That said, this might not be the most correct approach to the OKRs in design. While you could treat them as a part of the marketing or product department, designers often face their own challenges and should set their own goals. They might be output-based (focused on the process rather than results), but that is still better than having no Objectives at all. 

To get a list of Design OKRs tailor-made for your company, book a call with Oboard OKR Consulting!

OKRs for Designers

Designers are most commonly assigned to the marketing or product departments. However, if you have a separate Design department, here’s how you could design their first OKRs:

  • [O] Boost the efficiency of the design team
    • [KR] Conduct 1-to-1 meetings with each of the designers and find out where everyone needs to go
    • [KR] Discuss with the team what can be improved in the site design
    • [KR] Provide tutorials and videos for designers to improve their skills
  • [O] Create a company design guide to base all further development around.
    • [KR] Conduct interviews and get a checklist of requirements from all team leads;
    • [KR] Research competition and references to determine current trends;
    • [KR] Create 5 distinct mockups for the company’s website, merch and overall style.
    • [KR] Finalize the design guide after approval and create a company-wide redesign plan.
  • [O] Create a product design prototype.
    • [KR] Collect requirements to understand customer needs
    • [KR] Create 5 detailed designs
    • [KR] Submit the final design to the project manager for approval.

OKRs for UX\UI

Visual flair is great, but any interaction must be easy to use and understand. That’s why it is important to establish UI and UX OKRs, especially if you are already having issues with them. For example, you could do it like this:

  • [O] Develop an application design
    • [KR] Analyze the designs of competing applications
    • [KR] Discuss with the team what features can be added or improved
    • [KR] Make 3 mockups of the application
  • [O] Make the user interface more easy-to-understand
    • [KR] Analyze the interface of 10 competitor websites
    • [KR] Redesign of 10 key design features by the end of the quarter
    • [KR] Test new designs within a team and get feedback

OKR for Marketing Designers

Marketing is a massive concept, and a marketing designer should be a jack of all trades. However, they rarely create individual value, mostly acting as the force multiplier for the content the team produces otherwise. Therefore, it makes sense to run them on task-based Key Results as long as they have a steady flow of tasks. Even if some OKR purists may disagree.

  • [O] Prepare the necessary design layouts for marketing and sales
    • [KR] Make 12 Marketing Infographics
    • [KR] Create 1 mini-site for the sales department
    • [KR] Create 10 PDF documents about the product and its features
    • [KR] Create 30 Marketing Banners
    • [KR] Prepare business cards for the sales department

Alternatively, you could fold the design into the greater Marketing OKRs. For example, into Website OKRs:

  • [O] Create a new, better-performing landing page.
    • [KR] Test the existing landing page with at least 200 external users;
    • [KR] Analyze the test and reviews and find the 10 biggest design problems;
    • [KR] Create 5 new prototypes and test them to find the better one;

Conclusion

OKR for Web developers is an interesting concept — they are quite similar to the Engineering OKRs, but there are also some unique challenges. OKRs, in general, aren’t too hot on task-based management, and this sometimes clashes with the task-based nature of design work. That said, with some flexibility and creative thinking, you can make Web Design OKRs viable and productive.

That said, while OKRs are effective, they also add more busy work — and creative people like designers tend not to like busy work. That’s why we offer OKR Board for Jira — a powerful all-in-one OKR plugin that makes the OKR management process as simple as Paint yet as effective as Photoshop. With it, you can turn your Objectives into Epics, link tasks to Key Results, see cross-project progress on the OKR Roadmaps, and create executive reports with a single click. Start the free 30-day trial or request a demo right now!

jira
Take the friction out of managing OKRs and implement the framework with ease.

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