Analytics · 6 min read · Draft
Bring the funnel to the design review
Most design debates end faster when someone opens the dashboard. Here is how I run reviews with numbers on the table without turning design into spreadsheet work.
A design review usually has two kinds of people in the room: the ones with opinions about the screen, and the one person who knows what users did last week. The second person is rarely the designer. I think it should be.
Start with one question
Before I open Figma in a review, I open Metabase. One chart, one question: where did people stop? For the Taager order flow that was a single funnel from “open orders” to “confirm”. The drop between step two and three was the whole brief.
A funnel is a design critique written by users who never came to the meeting.
Keep the numbers boring
The chart does not need to be beautiful. It needs to be the same chart every week, so the room learns to read it. I use the same three views: the funnel, the time-to-complete distribution, and a short list of session recordings for the step we are discussing.
- Funnel: where people stop.
- Time to complete: where people struggle but still finish.
- Recordings: what the struggle actually looks like.
Decide, then measure again
The review ends with a decision and a number we expect to move. If the number does not move, the design was wrong, not the users. That sentence is uncomfortable the first few times. Then it becomes the most useful habit the team has.
