How Do You Combine a UX design Process with AARRR Framework?

Danny Setiawan
Product Coalition
Published in
3 min readMay 27, 2020

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Photo by UX Indonesia on Unsplash

This is an answer that I gave to a question asked on Quora. Since a lot of UX designers and Product Managers have trouble connecting the UX activities with the business metrics, I decided to share this here.

Essentially what you do is to apply the design thinking method to solve both the business problem and you do so by solving the user’s problem. Here’s how:

  1. Choose one of the AARRR (Acquisition Activation Retention Revenue Referral) metrics to improve. Which metric to choose would depend on the stage of your product/company.
  2. Gather data both quantitative (user behavior from analytics) and qualitative (user feedback, app store reviews, etc.) to get the baseline (current reality) of that metric. This also gives you an idea of what the problem might be. Look around and see what the number should be from your competitors/industry data. Also, look at your business model and figure out what’s the number you need to have. This is important because even if you’re better than your peers in the industry, if it doesn’t work for you business, then you’re still in trouble.
  3. Validate the problem from step #2 by conducting user interview/usability test to . If you’re working on a new product, fake it (i.e. use InVision prototype ). This will give you an idea whether it really is a problem, discover new problem(s) and a chance to figure out why problem occurs. In short, you’ll have the problem defined.
  4. Ideate on potential solutions. I normally get the stakeholders involved in sketching bunch of ideas and more importantly, get their buy in from early on. As you do this, make sure you keep going back to the metric defined in step #1 because people can get too excited about their idea and come up with cool ideas that don’t help the business (this is how pet projects are born).
  5. Turn the solution ideas into experiments. Make sure you state the hypothesis for each experiment (i.e. adding video demo would describe our product’s value more effectively, which will result in 50%+ more sign ups). Make sure both the action (what you’re doing) and the metric (the number that you’re trying to improve) are clearly defined. Don’t mess with more than one variable in each experiment since that will confuse you when you’re…

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Head of Design at CoCreate, , Lead Instructor at Flatiron School. Worked with major brands like The Economist, Yahoo!, General Assembly, MSN, PwC and startups