How to create a UX Scorecard

There was a lot of interest about my approach to UX Scorecards after my last post, so I wanted to share an overview of how I’ve approached scorecards that have been helpful for me and my team. I’ve used these scorecards to compare the practices of different teams within a single organization. The scorecard creates shared understanding with my leadership team about where we need to focus and can be used to advocate for additional investment in areas that are important to the business.

There are several ingredients that go into the creation of a scorecard which I will describe here.

Higher Level Categories
To gain a picture of where the overall UX needs attention within the portfolio, it’s been helpful to group criteria that we are evaluating into the higher-level categories of user research, UX design, and UI implementation. Certain teams may be stronger in one or two of these areas than the other, and dividing the score into these separate aspects has been useful to understand where there are the most opportunities for improvement.

Specific Criteria
Within those categories, I’ve included specific criteria that enable us to evaluate how much each team has adopted best practices that the organization is focused on. For instance, from a user research perspective, we strive to have up-to-date formative user research to keep our understanding of our target user personas up to date, so a score based on how recently research has been conducted has been a good criterion to include.

From a UX Design perspective, it’s been helpful to include criteria such as whether the team is actively using a Lean UX canvas to establish shared understanding for the user outcomes the design is intended to address, and to what degree the team embeds the designer in the process of creating new features. For UI implementation we include criteria including to what degree the team is leveraging common UI components from our Design System and whether there is enough attention to fit and finish from a polishing perspective.

Collecting and Evaluating the Data
We’ve sent surveys to stakeholders to collect their perspective and also conducted our own perspective to finalize the score for each item. Some criteria are easy to evaluate if it’s a matter of whether or not a team has conducted a particular activity. Others are more subjective such as the degree to which the team is focusing on fit and finish. Our goal is to create a basis for conversation about opportunities for the team to focus on and work together on to continue improving our product user experiences.

Scorecard Format
We’ve used a simple spreadsheet with columns for each product area and rows for each of the criteria grouped into categories, with each cell containing a score and a color. This enables us to have a heatmap of the areas that need attention.

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