Design Perception Score

Overview

Design's business value at Spring Health was widely believed but unevenly evidenced. PMs, execs, and sales could point to moments where design won a deal — but there was no durable signal that could be read the same way across functions, tracked over time, or used to connect design investments to buyer behavior.

Without a shared number, design was always re-litigating its own value. Investment conversations defaulted to vibes.

The Design Perception Score (DPS) is the fix: a weighted, prospect-sourced metric that quantifies how buyers perceive Spring Health's design during the sales process. Cumulative 2025 score: 5.86 / 7 (Good band). Target: 6.5, on the way to 6.8+.

The Design of the Metric

I wanted a metric that was cheap to collect, hard to game, and faithful to buyer intent. Three choices shaped it:

Ride existing research, don't add new instruments. The win/loss interview program was already running under Keara Smith. DPS pulls from it rather than asking buyers to complete a separate survey. Net new research load: zero.

Weight by what buyers actually decide on. Competitive comparison carries the heaviest weight — a 6 in isolation means less than a 6 relative to alternatives in a buyer's mind.

DPS = (Competitive Comparison × 0.5)
    + (Visual Appeal         × 0.3)
    + (Ease of Use           × 0.2)

Make it legible in 30 seconds. Interpretation bands let a non-design reader immediately place a number on a trajectory:

• 6.5 – 7.0 · Excellent — design is a significant differentiator
• 5.5 – 6.4 · Good — competitive, with room for refinement (we are here)
• 4.5 – 5.4 · Needs improvement — friction in usability or aesthetics
• Below 4.5 · Poor — design perceived as a barrier

A neutral default of 5.45 applies when an interview didn't surface a score — sitting on the cusp of Needs improvement / Good so missing data doesn't bias the average in either direction.

What the Data Said

Quarterly trend: 5.60 · 6.09 · 5.97 · 5.69 · Cumulative: 5.86

Across 33 prospects, consistent Good-band performance. The score established the baseline against which design investments can now be measured.

Verbatims surfaced clear patterns. On the strengths side, care navigation, scheduling flows, and brand warmth came up repeatedly:

"It was the difference between a country music star at a 4-H fairground versus the Super Bowl halftime show." — Kimball Electronics

"Spring stands apart… your platform and technology look very different in the market." — Wolters Kluwer

On the gaps side: brand distinctiveness relative to Lyra, the Moments content library trailing Calm, and self-navigation friction in unguided contexts. These aren't opinions — they're a ranked list of design investments that move the score.

Outcome

DPS gave Spring Health's design conversation a shared vocabulary and a trendline. Product, marketing, sales, and design now read the same score with the same interpretation. The findings support a specific recommendation to make design philosophy and accessibility rigor an explicit part of the sales deck — converting a one-time "wow" moment into a sustainable differentiator.

The metric reframed the question from "is our design good?" to "is our design moving?" That's a question with a real answer.