In today’s world, user experience (UX) is not just a luxury, it’s a necessity! According to a list of top UX statistics of 2024 created by UX Cam:
- Every $1 invested in UX results in a return of $100.
- Increasing the budgeting of UX by 10% can lead to an 83% increase in conversions.
- 80% of the people are willing to pay more for a better user experience.
- 88% of the users are not likely to return after having a bad user experience.
These stats show how much UX matters but how do we keep our UX updated? The answer lies in UX metrics. This article will explore a few common UX metrics, their importance, a checklist to choose the right UX metrics for your product growth and tools to test them.
What are user experience metrics?
Image source: Medium article by Incharaprasad – User Experience Metrics
UX metrics communicate whether the steps to improve a product or service’s UX were successful and financially viable.
These metrics provide insight into how users interact and understand a product. Two broad classifications of UX metrics, i.e. quantitative and qualitative, help designers assess the user experience.
Why do user experience metrics matter for businesses?
For businesses, UX metrics are more than just numbers on a dashboard—they reflect how well a product performs in real-world scenarios. When aligned with business objectives, UX metrics can:
- Improve the decision-making process of stakeholders
UX metrics enable stakeholders to make informed decisions and not solely rely on intuition. Decision-making backed up by relevant user data leads to better results.
- Help gather honest user feedback
UX metrics tell the real story of how a user feels about your product or service. The feedback received via UX metrics highlights flaws that may have been missed during testing or emerged under conditions specific to the user.
- Helps identify user patterns
UX metrics monitor products and how users interact with them. They help identify why some users use the product for periods or why they stop using it altogether. They also help identify the users’ pain points, hurdles in their user journey, and areas of improvement.
Checklist to choose the right user experience metrics for your product
A UX metrics checklist is invaluable for choosing the right approach for your product. It ensures that research is systematic, comprehensive, and directly tied to business goals. Here’s a quick checklist to guide your UX research strategy:
1. Understand the product and goals of the business
It’s important to ensure that one understands the product and the business goals, the purpose of designing this product, and how it aligns with the business’s goals. For example, if the main goal of an e-commerce website is to boost sales, then a business might track the task success rate during the checkout process. If data reveals a high drop-off rate at payment, it signals a need to streamline the process or improve form usability.
2. Identify user journeys and prioritise user needs
UX designers need to identify and map all the possible user journeys and edge cases a user may take on their product. Identifying these touchpoints is important so that UX designers can implement the right metrics and get insights from user data.
While identifying the journeys, it is also important to understand what the user needs are and which flow is a high priority for them.
If we continue with the example of an e-commerce website, a user may prioritise buying or searching for a product or service above other navigation flows. This helps UX designers evaluate and optimise the targeted flow by selecting the right metrics while prioritising the business goals.
3. Set SMART goals for your product
When determining product goals, SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound) goals. incorporate all of these criteria to help focus your efforts and increase your chances of achieving them.
4. Test and iterate your UX metrics
UX designers might begin by deciding on a set of baseline UX metrics that complement the product’s goals and users’ requirements, then implementing these measures while continuously testing and improving. The product team can adjust the tracking of the UX metrics if analysts discover that some KPIs are more instructive than others over time.
5. Capture user feedback and keep improving
User feedback is invaluable in enhancing the overall user experience. Capturing user data, including their experiences, pain points, and preferences, through UX metrics, allows for a deeper understanding of their needs.
By incorporating these insights into the product development process, businesses can refine features, address challenges, and ultimately deliver a more seamless and user-centric experience.
4 common user experience metrics that businesses follow
Here’s a list of the most common UX metrics examples for businesses.
1. Task success rate
Image source: Medium article by Gabriel Gorski – Task success rate percentage
It is the most commonly used metric that helps understand the percentage of people who have successfully executed a task within a particular user journey.
Although this metric alone doesn’t provide much information, it provides a general understanding of the areas where the users may face problems and prompts the designers’ immediate attention.
2. Net promoter score (NPS)
Image source: CheckMarket alt – How NPS works and its classification
Introduced in 2003, the NPS score has become a standard UX metric for businesses focusing on enhancing the user experience of their products and services. It consists of an 11-point rating (0-10) that lets their users decide the likelihood of suggesting a product to their friends and family.
Businesses may classify users as ‘promoters’ if they rate their products as a 9 or 10. Users who choose a score of 7 or 8 are considered ‘passive’ and have a high chance of being converted into ‘promoters’. Everything below these ratings is considered ‘detractors’.
3. Customer satisfaction score (CSAT)
Image source: MarcomRobot – CSAT rating card
It’s a simple method of analysing how satisfied users are with your product or service. This typically involves various methods such as survey questionnaires, user interviews or monitoring a task and then asking users to rate their experience.
Using the CSAT formula [Number of satisfied responses / Total number of responses] x 100, this metric provides UX researchers and businesses alike with an idea of how their products and services are performing in reality.
4. Bounce and exit rates
Image source: CXL – Bounce and exit rate calculation
According to Google, a bounce rate is “single-page sessions divided by all sessions or the percentage of all sessions on your site in which users viewed only a single page and triggered only a single request to the Analytics server.”
A bounce occurs when a visitor leaves a page or a flow without completing it, or without interacting with any other element of a single page, for example, a user who visited your website to complete the onboarding process but left midway without creating an account.
On the other hand, the exit rate tracks the percentage of users leaving from a specific page within your site.
High bounce or exit rates can indicate that users are not finding what they need quickly, which may point to poor usability issues. Refining the user journey to address these can increase engagement and conversion rates.
What are the tools to measure user experience metrics?
Depending on what you want to measure, you can use different tools, as some only focus on one task or metric, while others cover most of the metrics a business needs to capture user data for decision-making and optimisation of the user experience.
UserQ
UserQ is a remote research testing platform specifically created to make user testing effortless and affordable in the MENA region. If you have your users or are about to launch in any of the countries under the MENA region, UserQ is your best bet to get valuable insights on user behaviour and data.
A panel of more than 16k testers from across the MENA region will help you to recruit and test with real users. A few of our key offerings include:
- Testing prototypes of a digital product and collecting feedback on its usability.
- Testing the information architecture via tree tests allows researchers to define a logical, easy-to-navigate hierarchy by asking testers to complete specific tasks.
- Conducting surveys to accurately identify market trends.
Google Analytics
Google Analytics is a widely used analytics tool for capturing and analysing user and product metrics to gain a deeper understanding of your user’s insights by tracking
- Qualitative and quantitative user data.
- Conversion rates of visitors to users.
- Number of page visitors, average page sessions, and bounce rates.
- Organic and paid keywords that lead to product discovery by visitors.
Hotjar
Hotjar is a tool that shines when it comes to capturing UX metrics. It can help in the following scenarios:
- If someone wants to record the user sessions on their product
- Analyse heatmaps and understand user patterns.
- What gets their attention, and what does not.
- Takes user feedback via polls, which can analyse the customer satisfaction score.
- Identify bottlenecks on your website that lead to an increase in user bounce rates.
Conclusion
A blend of both qualitative and quantitative user data is required to fully understand user behaviour and patterns, and UX metrics play a key role by allowing a business to understand where to focus and how to improve the user experience.
While selecting the metrics, ensure you follow the checklist to understand your product and business requirements, as this will help you save time and other resources. This will help connect business and research for greater impact.
If you’d like to know more about user experience and how you can capture the right insights of your users, read our articles and keep learning.
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