We’ve seen it now many times. The right UX metrics can be powerfully influential for UX leaders.

Armed with the right metrics, UX leaders can vividly demonstrate the immense value of a well-crafted user experience. Executives and senior stakeholders — those who approve budgets and set delivery deadlines — start setting high-level corporate objectives around improving those metrics, making it more likely they’ll approve bigger budgets and set more accommodating deadlines.

UX leaders use these metrics and goals to inspire their development and product team peers to prioritize UX, pushing off their strong desire to rush something into delivery before it’s ready. Everyone focuses on delivering great experiences for customers and users.

Great metrics are crucial to aligning everyone on the goals of what better user experiences can bring: the improvement in the lives of your users and customers.

We’ve also seen, far too often, that most UX leaders don’t pick the right metrics. They neglect to pick metrics that are inspirational. Instead, they gravitate toward metrics whose only redeeming quality is that they’re simple to measure.

These metrics aren’t winning over executives and stakeholders. The UX leaders miss their opportunity to impress these folks because they chose the wrong metrics. As a result, the UX leaders end up seeing these metrics as numbers they are supposed to produce to check off the objective of having something — anything — to report that’s measurable.

These metrics are also ignored by product and development peers. These peers don’t find them aspirational and quickly push them aside when the winds shift. They’re inclined to move the goalposts when someone has a new, sexy idea for a product enhancement. (“AI all the things!”)

Choosing the right metrics that inspire and influence everyone throughout the organization is challenging. It’s easy to grasp any old metric, and that’s what many UX leaders do.

However, it becomes easier once you realize there’s a difference between UX metrics: focusing on someone’s experience and basic metrics: simply reporting how the product is…