Design OKR Examples

OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) help design teams demonstrate their impact through quantitative goal setting. Design team OKRs can eliminate distractions to drive focus while proving the impact of design initiatives.  

Learn more about OKRs and how to use them

Whether it’s graphic design, web design, UX/UI, or beyond, design teams influence every part of a user’s journey. Design OKRs lean into the cross-functional nature of design, helping every team that leans on design through focused execution.

A designer’s time is finite — this is the ultimate consideration of design OKRs. The challenge of too many distractions threatens to detract from what drives real impact. Designers can be siloed into a task-delivery service, rather than proactively focusing on the organization’s greater goals.

OKRs for designers correct the focus of the team and quantify the impact of their contributions. 

As a service-first team, designers are involved with ongoing projects from other departments. However, failure to prioritize the projects that matter leads to wasted time and burned resources. 

Design OKRs counter this by ensuring designers are focused on an aligned objective, concentrating their efforts on progressing key results.

Objectives connect design teams to the greater goals of the organization. While these goals may concern other departments like sales and marketing, design OKRs infuse the question of “why” to help teams determine which requests will drive impact.

Finally, design team OKRs reduce subjectivity — another challenge for creative teams. 

Key results take qualitative inputs and measure them with quantitative metrics. Design OKRs align initiatives to higher objectives and metrics, highlighting a clear path for progress through OKRs.

Rather than tasking away on projects with unproven impact, OKRs for designers maximize valuable time inputs.

Great design OKRs are more than creating nice visuals or improvements — they emphasize work that fills important business needs.

Design leaders should use OKRs to bring the “why” mentality to all designers, pushing teams to pursue goals instead of task lists.

The challenge in OKRs for designers

Setting OKRs for design teams is unique because of the creative, subjective nature of the work. Key results tackle this challenge, presenting quantitative focus areas for designers. Optimization is core to design OKRs, whether in speed or quality. 

Speed-focused key results may involve:

• Process time
• Design output delivery time
• Turnaround time for optimizations

Quality-focused key results, conversely, may involve:

• Looking at the performance of optimizations
• Impact of new contributions
• Consistency of revisions

Task-based key results are common in design teams, as outputs and testing for effectiveness are part of the design process — but key results shouldn’t be a glorified task list. 

Even with output-centered key results, OKRs should reflect on the performance improvement of the designer or the team.  

• “Create 10 PDF assets for XYZ Campaign” is a task item
• “Improve asset output by 20%” is a performance-focused key result

Well-written design team OKRs take goal setting to the next level for designers, focusing outputs into outcomes. 

Design OKRs are as cross-functional as the design team itself. 

Each focus area has a separate OKR or a key result tied to a collective OKR. OKRs for designers can be focused around areas like:

• Website design
• Graphic design
• Design systems
• Design performance
• Branding
• Workflow

Check out all our design OKR examples below.

OKRs for designers: website

Design OKR example 1

• Objective: Redesign and launch our new website
• Key result 1: Conduct stakeholder interviews with 10 people from sales and marketing
• Key result 2: Design new version of our site structure, navigation and all pages
• Key result 3: User-test page prototypes on 12 people
• Key result 4: With development and marketing, launch website by June 1st
• Key result 5: Increase visitor to % sign-up ratio from 10% to 20% 

Design OKR example 2

• Objective: Boost performance through landing page UX/UI
• Key result 1: Double CTA conversion to 16%
• Key result 2: Increase page navigation rate to 5%
• Key result 3: Double product image gallery open rate to 24%  

OKRs for graphic design

Design OKR example 1

• Objective: Support marketing with a design overhaul
• Key result 1: Achieve 150 graphic downloads from blog post infographics
• Key result 2: Update ad set creatives to double ad clicks from 12k to 24k
• Key result 3: Redesign e-book landing pages to double conversion rate to 50% 

Design OKR example 2

• Objective: Design consistency is A+
• Key result 1: Implement a branded design guide by EOQ1
• Key result 2: Ensure 90% adherence to design guide by EOQ2
• Key result 3: Reduce instances of re-design elements to < 5 per quarter

OKRs for design systems

Design OKR example 1

• Objective: Make our design systems fast and seamless
• Key result 1: Create a design library with 100 most-used elements
• Key result 2: Restructure design brief to reduce total design iterations by 25%
• Key result 3: Implement a category and tag system for used designs 

Design OKR example 2

• Objective: Streamline with PM
• Key result 1: Implement a new project management tool with 95% adherence in 8 weeks
• Key result 2: Reduce time on task by 25%
• Key result 3: Reduce average wait time for tasks by 1 days (33%)

OKRs for design performance

Design OKR example 1

• Objective: Design deliverables directly contribute to sales and marketing’s best quarter yet
• Key result 1: Increase asset output by 20%
• Key result 2: Ensure two-week SLA for graphic asset delivery from concept to approval
• Key result 3: Create and maintain an asset library to allow for easy access for sales and marketing and eliminate the need to recreate previous work
• Key result 4: 4x new ideas assets added to the library

Design OKR example 2

• Objective: Make our mobile app more user friendly
• Key result 1: Reduce # of clicks required to complete tasks by 35%
• Key result 2: Improve average user satisfaction score from 4.2 to 4.6
• Key result 3: Increase average session length by 25%

OKRs for designers: branding

Design OKR example 1

• Objective: Become a design-driven company
• Key result 1: Establish a set of brand and design guidelines, and publish publicly as PDF and online
• Key result 2: Set budget for design software, online presence accounts and premium resources for other teams to self-serve and create on their own (mockup templates, wireframe kits, stock photos and illustrations)
• Key result 3: Conduct 3 monthly designer meetups at our office 

OKRs for designers: workflow

Design OKR example 1

• Objective: Slash the design to development lag
• Key result 1: Reduce design task tickets reopened by dev to 15%
• Key result 2: Reduce “small improvement” resolution time to 3 days
• Key result 3: Increase “in-execution” design requests from 40 to 70% 

For better results, use OKR software to elevate your design team's effectiveness. An OKR software solution can drive swift, transparent, and feedback-driven interactions, ensuring your design team works collaboratively toward shared objectives.

Heres an OKR for designers would look like within a specialized OKR software platform such as Quantive Results:

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