Key result | Owner | Target | Current progress | Score | Status |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Increase onboarding tutorial completion rate from 48% to 70% | Product Designer | 70% | 62% | 0.6 | 🟡 |
Reduce time to first meaningful action from 3 min to 1.5 min | UX Researcher | 1.5 min | 2.2 min | 0.4 | 🟡 |
Increase activation rate (D1 to D7 retention) from 22% to 35% | Product Manager | 35% | 38% | 0.9 | 🟢 |
Reduce support tickets about setup confusion by 30% | UX Writer | -30% | -10% | 0.2 | 🔴 |
In this table, color-coding helps the UX team and other stakeholders:
- Spot weak areas early
- Discuss blockers with the right owners
- Decide whether to reprioritize initiatives or increase collaboration
Color-coding is a low-effort, high-impact way to make your UX OKRs more transparent and actionable—especially when managing complex UX workflows, multi-role team structures, or sharing progress across UX leadership.
6. Progress tracking formula
When you’re dealing with moving metrics like user satisfaction, task completion time, or retention, you need a reliable way to show progress.
This formula helps you translate raw numbers into a clear percentage:
(Current value – Starting value) ÷ (Target value – Starting value) × 100
Why it’s useful:
- It gives your team a shared understanding of where things stand
- You can compare progress across different key results
- It works for both performance-based and perception-based metrics
For example:
- Key result: Increase mobile checkout completion rate from 52% → 75%
- Starting value: 52%
- Current value: 64%
- Target value: 75%
(64 – 52) ÷ (75 – 52) × 100 = 52% progress
This tells your UX team and stakeholders that you’re over halfway there—even if the raw metric doesn’t seem that impressive yet. It’s especially helpful in design reviews or when reporting upwards to product management or leadership.
💡 Pro tip
Visualize this progress alongside your color-coded key results to spot trends and risk areas fast.
Best practices for creating UX OKRs
These best practices will help you create OKRs that align with business goals, focus on user needs, and deliver measurable improvements.
- Tie every objective to a broader business goal: Your OKRs shouldn't live in a UX silo. Use strategic frameworks like Jobs-to-Be-Done to keep UX OKRs grounded in what users are trying to accomplish—not just what they’re clicking.
- Limit OKRs to what the UX team can influence: It’s tempting to chase metrics like revenue or MQLs, but your key results should stay within the team’s control—things like usability scores%2F2)))-,Maze%20Usability%20Score%20(MAUS),every%20mission%20in%20the%20maze.), onboarding completion, or user satisfaction.
- Balance qualitative and quantitative results: Combine metrics (like completion rate or NPS) with insights (like feedback from usability testing). This gives a fuller picture of impact and helps track progress even when numbers lag.
- Review and recalibrate OKRs every quarter: UX is iterative—your OKRs should be too. Make time to review, grade, and update them based on what you’ve learned from testing, research, and product changes.
- Use purpose-built tools to track and align: Spreadsheets work, but you can also explore OKR tools like Tability, Perdoo, or Quantive to help UX teams visualize progress, assign owners, and keep everyone aligned. Bonus: they integrate with tools your team already uses—like Slack, Notion, or Jira—so updates stay visible and timely.
Implementing UX OKRs: 4 Examples
Get inspired by how leading teams use UX OKRs to align design efforts with business goals. These real examples show what effective, measurable UX OKRs look like in action.
1. Octoparse
At Octoparse, the team set a UX OKR focused on improving their data extraction success rate—a major pain point for users dealing with complex website structures. Their key results targeted a 30% reduction in failed extractions, a 20% decrease in onboarding time, and an increase in successfully completed tasks per user.
We tackled this by improving our auto-detection algorithm, redesigning the onboarding flow, and adding real-time error suggestions.
Kevin Liu
VP of Products at Octoparse
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To track progress, they combined session recordings, user surveys, and support ticket analysis. Within six months, they achieved all their goals and saw a clear drop in user complaints—proving how well-crafted UX OKRs can directly improve user outcomes.
2. Adobe
Adobe’s Digital Imaging team—home to products like Photoshop and Lightroom—was using spreadsheets to manage UX OKRs, which led to inconsistent tracking and slow decisions. To fix this, they partnered with their data science team to build an Automated OKR Reporting Framework.
This framework pulled product usage metrics directly from internal analytics tools and fed them into a unified dashboard, eliminating manual updates. With real-time data tied to each key result, UX teams could track progress instantly, align with the broader UX strategy, and focus on design decisions.
The result? Faster product decisions, stronger UX strategy alignment, and over 1,000 key results tracked automatically across eight products.
3. Action1
At Action1, Peter’s team set a UX OKR aimed at reducing user frustration in their patch management workflow—a critical flow users often found confusing and time-consuming. The objective focused on streamlining the experience, with key results set to decrease the average time to schedule a patch by 40%, improve the self-service success rate by 25%, and boost NPS scores related to ease of use.
We achieved this by simplifying the patch selection UI, adding tooltips, and creating an in-app walkthrough.
Peter Barnett
VP of Product Strategy at Action1.
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The results spoke for themselves: time-to-schedule dropped by 45%, and support tickets related to patching fell by 30%!
4. Amazon
Amazon’s journey with UX OKRs centers on one principle: customer obsession. They adopted OKRs to align every team with this mission—starting with the customer and working backward.
During the dot-com crash, Amazon used OKRs to double down on logistics and customer service, setting specific, measurable goals tied to operational excellence and product innovation. Teams tracked quantitative metrics like delivery speed and NPS, and qualitative data like user feedback.
Over time, they built a culture of continuous improvement. This framework helped Amazon stay agile, empowered teams to own UX goals, and scaled innovation across every product line.
Key takeaways
UX OKRs help show the real value of your team’s work. When you align design efforts with business goals and track measurable outcomes, you prove that UX drives growth, retention, and revenue.
Here’s what to take away:
- Start with company priorities and link your UX goals to them
- Make every key result measurable—think in metrics
- Keep your team aligned with regular reviews and transparent tracking
Use frameworks and tools to make OKRs part of your workflow, not a one-time effort
When you implement UX OKRs, you give your team direction, focus, and a way to prove impact. You start showing real results—making it easier to get buy-in, funding, and recognition for the work you do.
Give your UX goals a glow-up
Plan smarter, track cleaner, and actually show what your team is achieving.