When you’re writing accomplishments, they should follow the pattern “what you did and how well you did it”—where “how well” ideally means how your actions benefited the company. I covered “what you did” in an earlier post (“Writing accomplishments: What you did”) and in this post I’m going to cover “how well you did it.”
Benefits to the company are simple, because only two things matter: increasing revenues and decreasing costs. This is true even if you work at an agency. Success on behalf of your clients should be framed in terms of referrals, repeat business, and the agency’s ability to win accounts—in other words, how the project’s success benefited your employer.
Nonprofits are a slightly different story because the organization exists to benefit others. In that case, you can use the same guidance below, and apply it to both the results for the organization and the outcomes for your membership or constituent group.
Decreasing costs is a benefit no matter what kind of organization you work for.
» Show me the money
The most powerful way to describe your impact on an organization’s revenue or costs is to put a dollar value on it. Here are a few examples:
- Designed a mobile booking app that brought in $1.2 million in new sales.
- Created a clickable prototype that helped us win a $60,000 project.
- Spent $380 to create an on-site test facility, saving the company $17,000 a year.
The best thing about including the dollar amount is that even a clueless recruiter can understand the value of your accomplishment.
The next best thing to the dollar amount is a number or percent. For example:
- Proposed a new site architecture that eliminated 18 resource-intensive screens.
- Streamlined the purchase funnel from eight screens down to two, reducing shopping cart abandons by 11%.
Remember, you’re trying to show a value that matters to the company. Conducting 25% more usability tests might have value, but without context it looks like an unnecessary expense. Also, don’t try to hide behind percentages. A 25% increase in tests from 40 to 50 is impressive. From 4 tests to 5, not so much.
» Don’t have numbers? Find some!
Unless you work in an industry like e-commerce that loves metrics, you might not have a number to put on your accomplishment. But that doesn’t mean they’re not out there! A little extra effort can often uncover the numbers that will turn your drab “improvement” of something into a quantified success.
Here are a few ideas for how to get numbers:
Ask sales or finance. The easiest way to find out the value of that new client or how much the product has sold in the last quarter is to ask the people who know.
Probe into casual feedback. You’ve just heard from the account rep that the feature you designed convinced an on-the-fence prospect to subscribe. Awesome! How much is that account going to be worth?
Do the math. Your new process turns a 15-minute task into a 2-minute one. If there are 13,000 people using the system, how many hours a year did you save the company?
Baseline at the start of the project. If you’re about to kick off a website redesign or shopping cart improvement, gather metrics at the beginning of the project so you know where you’re starting from. Then measure again when you’re done and tally up the difference. (Not sure what metrics to collect? There’s a good writeup on the topic over at UX Matters.).
» Proxies for increasing revenue
Let’s face it—most of the time it’s hard to draw a direct line between the work we do and the company’s balance sheet. That’s where proxies come in. Even if your work doesn’t directly contribute to the top line, it may contribute to:
- Uptick in subscriptions, membership, or users
- Increased conversions
- Repeat business
- More or better referrals
- Easier cross-sell or up-sell
- Higher Net Promoter Score
- Faster sales cycle
- More downloads
- Faster to market
- Good press, reviews, or industry awards
Let’s look at a couple of examples of accomplishments that use proxies for increasing revenue:
- Led a workshop for government employees that received an A+ satisfaction rating.
- Increased conversions by shrinking the checkout process to a single page.
» Proxies for decreasing costs
Decreasing costs doesn’t have to mean literally saving money. If you’re a good UX designer, you’re much more likely to be saving the company time and resources—both of which can be mapped directly to costs. When you’re thinking about your accomplishments, examine whether your work resulted in:
- On time, on budget, and within scope delivery
- Fewer iterations
- Process improvements
- Templates and pattern reuse
- Fewer bugs and escalations
- Adoption of open-source tools
- Fewer screens to design and write
- Faster task completion
- Bringing more work in-house
- Fewer support calls
- Improved data entry accuracy
- Better communication
For example:
- Identified several easy-to-fix usability issues by conducting a quick heuristic review.
- Created personas that helped UX and developers focus on user goals.
Those last two examples are instructive because most of you probably have a bullet in your resume saying you did a heuristic review or created personas, but you haven’t analyzed what the value of that work was to the company. Doing a heuristic review is nice, but knowing and articulating the value of that effort is a hundred times better. And think how much better you’ll perform in the interview now that you’ve taken the time to quantify or qualify the results of your work.