How to define success criteria

Before you start measuring anything, you need to have a clear idea of what you want to achieve with your service design project. Together with the team, you need to:

First, define your desired outcomes:

After having conducted user research and analysis, teams should spend time reflecting about your desired outcomes. Ask yourself:

• What do we want to achieve with this project/redesign/improvement?

For example, one of the outcomes you're looking for could be at an user experience level (i.e. patients spending less time trying to book a GP appointment), at a transactional-level (i.e. increase number of specialists appointments bookings by 20%) or at a policy-level (i.e. more elderly residents can access at-home specialist support.)

• What is the expected long, medium and short term impact?

Try to break down your expected outcomes into three sections (short, medium and long term outcomes). Then create connections to understand what short-term outcomes lead to medium-term changes and to long-term outcomes.

Second, define a set of metrics or Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) to measure your desired outcomes:

KPIs are the metrics that you use to track and quantify your progress toward your service success criteria. The KPIs should include a range of both quantitative and qualitative metrics to provide a comprehensive view of the project's outcomes.

You need to define specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound (SMART) goals and metrics that align with your service vision and strategy.

Lastly, define a strategy for collecting and measuring the defined success metrics/KPIs:

Once the success criteria are defined, it is important to establish a strategy for their measurement (how data is collected and when), keeping in mind the importance of accessing that information information at various stages of the process, and being able to use it to adjust the workflow and the features being developed

 

Examples of KPIs or success criteria

Depending on what you have defined as KPIs or success criteria, there are multiple ways in which you can measure them:

• Service user satisfaction

User satisfaction is a measure of how happy and satisfied the users are with the service they receive. It can be assessed by using surveys, interviews, feedback forms, or ratings (i.e. number of referrals).

• Service user behaviour

User behaviour is a measure of how the users interact with the service, and what actions they take as a result of the service. It can be tracked by using analytics, logs, observations, or experiments (i.e. task success rate).

• Service quality

Service quality measures how well the service performs and delivers. It can be evaluated by using various standards, benchmarks, indicators, or audits (i.e. number of complaints).

 

How to measure success

When measuring the success of your service design project, you can use various methods and tools, depending on your goals and metrics.

• Surveys and feedback forms are simple and quick ways to collect quantitative and qualitative data from users and stakeholders.
• Interviews and focus groups are more in-depth, interactive methods to gather insights and opinions.
• Observations and ethnography provides an immersive, empathetic understanding of users in their natural context.
• Analytics tools and dashboards can be used to track and monitor the performance and impact of your service.

These methods allow you to gather a comprehensive view of your project's success and areas for improvement.

 

Hints and tips

The impact of improvements made to social and health services often take a long time to appear, particularly when the approach is preventative i.e. you might only see the impact of increasing health preventative services on national health figures five or ten years later.