What are UX metrics?
How would you know if your design was successful? You probably wouldn’t know for sure if you don’t validate your solution in a measurable way!
UX metrics are the indicators that show whether your product design strategy is working or not.
Design is, of course, an iterative process — this quantitative data that you collect & analyze can help you make better design decisions in the future.
Here are some examples of UX metrics:
- How many employees who use the employee portal for the first time are able to successfully submit a leave request for approval? (“Task success rate”)
- What percentage of users who enter your blog end up signing up for the newsletter? (“Conversion rate”)
- What proportion of your monthly active users engage with your product every day? (“Stickiness”)
Since UX metrics are gathered through quantitative usability testing (rather than qualitative usability testing), they can be expensive.
Remember that qualitative usability testing is done to identify problems or opportunties in the UX of the product in question, and gaining insights on how to fix them — around 5 participants is standard for a qualitative study. However, quantitative testing requires a larger sample size — anywhere from 20 to 40 participants need to be recruited and compensated — in order to ensure accuracy of the metrics. This makes the latter more expensive.
You could use analytics solutions (like Google Analytics) as a cheaper alternative to gather the data, even though it would be at the cost of less cleaner measurements, and lacking context i.e. the why behind user behaviour.
Relationship between UX metrics and business KPI’s
Business KPI’s, such as Revenue per User (RPU), Average Order Value (AOV), Cost per Install (CPI), etc. measure the success of your business as a whole, and it can be useful to work backwards from the most significant KPI’s to determine which UX metrics are relevant for you. E.g. for an e-commerce app that wants to increase its RPU (business KPI), it should, among other things, reduce its cart abandonment rate (UX metric).
Business metrics vs. marketing metrics
Certain metrics that are used to measure the success of marketing campaigns, e.g. no. of unique visitors, are not linked to user experience. In this case, conversion rate (number of users who take a desired action / total number of visitors), might be the relevant UX metric to track.
The 2 categories of UX metrics
UX metrics are are divided into 2 categories — behavioral and attitudinal.
- Behavioral : What are the users doing? What problems are they facing along the way? We gather this information using task-based testing. Examples of behavioral metrics include : task success rate, abandonment rate, time on task, conversion rate, error rate, and average session length.
- Attitudinal : What are the users saying? How are they feeling before, during and after using your product? This includes metrics of loyalty (measured using Net Promoter Score — NPS, or System Usability Scale — SUS), credibility (user trust, value and consideration), adoption (which features are the users using?), satisfaction (Do the users enjoy the product?)
In parts 2 and 3, we’ll delve deeper into these categories, and in part 4, we’ll learn which UX metrics to use when, and what measuring UX metrics looks like in practice. Stay tuned!
