UX metrics series — Part 3: Attitudinal metrics
We looked at behavioral metrics in the previous part. In this article, we’re going to learn more about attitudinal metrics (what the users are saying). Very often, what the users do (actual behavior) vs. what they say are quite different.
The purpose of attitudinal research is to understand or measure people’s stated beliefs, but it is limited by what people are aware of and willing to report.
Such self-reported information can help designers in measuring and categorizing attitudes, or collecting self-reported data that can help track or discover important issues to address.
Let’s look at 4 of the most commonly used attitudinal metrics.
1. DAU/MAU (also known as ‘user stickiness’)
DAU/MAU is the ratio of daily active users over monthly active users, expressed as a percentage. It’s a measure of a loyalty.
So, a 10% DAU/MAU stickiness ratio means that 10% of your monthly active users will log in on any given day.
For reference, apps over 20% stickiness are said to be good, and 50% is world-class (this may not be applicable to products where the usage is less frequent, but each interaction is high value, such as e-commerce).
2. Net Promoter Score (NPS)
NPS uses a simple one-question survey : “How likely are you to recommend this product to friend, on a scale of 1 to 10?”; and it measures customer loyalty.
Those who respond with a score of 9 or 10 are called ‘promoters’; those who respond with a 7 or 8 are called ‘passives’; and those who respond with a score of 0–6 score are called ‘detractors.’
NPS is calculated by subtracting the percentage of detractors from the percentage of promoters.
NPS can range from -100% (only detractors) to +100% (only promoters). A postitive score shows more loyalty (promoters outnumbering detractors).
In practice, NPS ranges from -26% to 40%, with an average of 15%.
3. System Usability Scale (SUS)
SUS is a post-test questionnaire (meaning it is presented at the end of a session, to understand how the users perceive the usability of the app as a whole).
It is a series of 10 Likert-scale questions (i.e. scale ranging from ‘Strongly disagree’ to ‘Strongly agree’), and produces a score of 0–100.
It’s an old scale, which means there is large amount of data to benchmark your score.
SUS correlates strongly with NPS, so NPS might be more useful overall, since its simpler to collect.
4. Single Ease Question (SEQ)
SEQ is a post-task question asked at the end of every task in a session. This can help you know which part of the workflows are perceived as most problematic.
It asks the user to rate the difficulty of the activity they just completed on a 7-point rating scale, from Very Difficult to Very Easy.
In the next part of the series, we’ll be covering how to pick the right UX metric for your product, and more.
