Your New UX Habit: Establishing Baselines for Impact

Gather Baseline Metrics Before Starting a Project

Gather baseline metrics before starting a project so your team can demonstrate its impact.

Between delivery timelines and limited resources, cutting data collection upfront seems like an efficient choice. Without benchmarks to compare to, however, it’s impossible to demonstrate improvement. (Don’t worry, we have some other options for reducing UX waste.) In fact, one of the most common ways UX teams undermine their own value isn’t by doing poor work, but by measuring too late. Instead of cutting initial benchmark measurements, create a habit and prioritize establishing baselines before any work is done, so your efforts are seen.

What Is a Baseline

A baseline is an initial benchmark of a product or service to gauge its relative performance against a meaningful standard. The first step in utilizing benchmarks for impact is establishing a baseline for comparison. You need a “before” to make the “after” mean something. It’s like the English saying: “How long is a piece of string?” You can’t determine how long a string is without having something to compare against, like your arm or a measuring tape.

Demonstrating value works the same way. A clear baseline makes later results meaningful. If a task-completion rate was 48% before the redesign and 67% after, that 19% increase proves your effect (provided that it is, indeed, statistically significant). Without the 48%, the 67% is just a number - you don’t know if it’s better, worse, or roughly what you’d expect without any design intervention.

Baselines Are More than a Comparison

Baselines enhance UX value beyond post-task metrics alone. They give UX teams a chance to identify other areas for impact and build credibility with their stakeholders. Making baseline identification a habit creates a natural entry point for broader discovery.

When you measure the current experience before you start designing, you’re likely to gain additional information on how users interact with your product. You might discover additional information about users’ struggles and flesh out areas where understanding is incomplete. Trying to identify which metrics practitioners need to benchmark can give you a better sense of what to target and change (but don’t go chasing vanity metrics).

But baselines also have a more direct impact on the reporting phase (in addition to enabling comparisons). Taking time to intentionally build baselines and benchmarks builds credibility when your team argues for its importance.

Some teams might try to get the best of both worlds by cutting initial data collection while still developing a baseline from historical data or analytics setups. This is an incredibly common practice and, when done with intention and a quality understanding of the data, can be a great option. But this workaround cannot be used as a consistent baseline measurement method. If data was collected for different reasons, it might be missing or incomplete. Presenting this data as your baseline might not capture your team’s full changes or misrepresent the impact you did make. Unless your team knows this prerecorded data well and is ready to use it intentionally, it’s easier to build the habit of measuring early instead of trying to fit preexisting data where it doesn’t belong.

Best Practices for Choosing a Baseline

The first step to building any habit is incorporating it in a way that feels easy and right. Avoiding common mistakes that cost you time and money will make establishing a long-term benchmarking practice more tenable.

Choose Relevant over Easy

The most common mistake is choosing a metric that’s easy to collect rather than one that directly reflects the user behavior you’re trying to respond to. Page views and session duration are easy to pull from analytics, but if the project is about making a checkout flow less confusing, neither of those numbers tells you much. What you want is something closer to the behavior itself: checkout-completion rate, error rate at specific steps, or time taken to complete a purchase.

A useful test for any candidate metric is to ask: if this number improves, does that mean users have a better experience with the thing we changed? If the answer requires multiple inferential steps, the metric is probably too indirect. If the answer is obviously yes, you’re in the right territory.

Track One Metric

Pick one metric and commit to it. Tracking five things isn’t more rigorous than tracking one; it just creates the opportunity to report whichever one moved in the right direction, which is a form of cherry-picking that will undermine trust over time. A single, well-chosen metric that you identified before the project started is far more convincing than a collection of metrics assembled after the results came in.

Prioritize Behavioral over Attitudinal Metrics

Behavioral metrics come from analytics or instrumentation and reflect how users physically interact (i.e., completion rates, error rates, dropoff rates, and return visits). Attitudinal metrics come directly from users, often collected through surveys, and reflect how they feel or their attitudes (i.e., perceived ease, satisfaction, and confidence).

Both are legitimate, but they measure different things. Behavioral metrics tell you what happened; attitudinal metrics tell you how it felt. For most value-demonstration purposes, behavioral metrics are more defensible because they’re less open to interpretation.

The metric you choose also signals something to your stakeholders. When you name a specific, behavior-linked measure at kickoff and then report on it at the end, you’re showing that you planned for accountability, that demonstrating value was part of the project from the start, not an afterthought.

How to Baseline in Practice

Once you’ve chosen your metric, establishing a baseline can be as simple as a 3-step process. The steps are straightforward, but the discipline is building the habit of going through them before work begins.

1. Measure the Current Experience
   How you establish a baseline depends on what you’re measuring. For behavioral metrics, you’ll typically work with existing analytics or set up instrumentation to capture the specific events you need. For attitudinal metrics or task-based measures like completion rate and time on task, a small benchmark usability study is often the most reliable method. The goal is a number you can defend: here is where the experience stands today, measured this way, on this date.

2. Document the Method Alongside the Number
   A baseline without documentation isn’t a baseline. Write down how you measured, who you measured (user segment, recruitment criteria, session conditions), when you measured, and what the number was. This matters because your post-launch measurement needs to use a comparable method to be a valid comparison. If you benchmark with a moderated usability study in January and then compare it against an unmoderated study in August, the difference in method will raise questions you don’t want.

3. Share It with Stakeholders Before You Build
   When stakeholders understand the baseline, conversations after launch focus on completing a story rather than making a case for UX’s impact. Stakeholders don’t have to buy into work that’s complete and resources that have been drained. They’re watching the solution to a problem space they’re familiar with and invested in.

Conclusion

Proving real impact requires comparison. Without a before measurement, an after measurement is just a number. It can’t tell you whether your work made a difference, and it can’t measure the extent of that change. If you’re trying to build UX maturity and build stakeholder buy-in, the first step is making baseline benchmarking a habit within your team.