User experience Balanced Scorecard

In recent years, a lot of organisations started to open their eyes to the notion of user experience and many companies started to treat it as an integral part of their overall business strategy. Previous research in business and other disciplines has shown that providing good user experience in products and services delights customers, increases adoption, retention, loyalty and most importantly revenue. While poor user experience discourages people from using a given product or service and drives them to the competition.

Therefore, to go with the spirit of the current times and to be successful in today’s fierce business world, organisations need to better plan how to manage and measure user experience. The usual way of doing this is to have some sort of system for managing strategy and measuring progress toward achieving goals. One such popular system is the Balanced Scorecard, which first came into attention of the business world in the early 1990s with the publication of the Harvard Business Review article “The Balanced Scorecard – Measures that Drive Performance” by Dr. Robert Kaplan of Harvard Business School and Dr. David Norton, the co-founder of the consulting company Renaissance Solutions.

Kaplan and Norton suggest that the strategic objectives of every company need to be balanced across four perspectives:

1. The customer perspective—companies need to find out how customers perceive them.
2. The internal business perspective—companies should ask what it is that they must excel at.
3. The innovation, learning and growth perspective—companies must ask whether they can continue to improve and create value.
4. The financial perspective—companies have to decide on their strategic objectives in terms of increasing revenue and reducing cost.

Each perspective of the Balanced Scorecard includes:

1. Objectives—the major objectives companies must achieve.
2. Measures—the observable parameters companies use to measure their progress toward reaching their objectives.
3. Targets—the specific target values for the measures.
4. Initiatives—action programs companies initiate to meet their objectives.

For each perspective there might be many objectives. Objectives for user experience may include user research, design reviews and usability evaluation, etc. With the Balanced Scorecard system, organisationa can align and manage their key corporate objectives in terms of user experience and become driven by their mission rather than by short-term financial performance.

According to David Norton, the Balanced Scorecard “puts strategy at the centre of the management system instead of finance”. However, this desirable switch doesn’t provide instant results. Norton says that organisations have to allow up to two years for the process and cites the example of Mobil Oil, which in 1993 ranked seventh among the major oil companies in comparative profitability and within three years of using the balanced scorecard system, it led the industry and its share price had doubled.

The Balances Scorecard system is definitely worth trying.