A Guide to Measuring the User Experience
As Product Designers or Entrepreneurs, we want to build products to be problem-solving, Satisfying, and easy to use. After the design, development process we roll out the product to market, then we have to track the experience of users with the product
But can we really measure User Experience? Absolutely. By evaluating products with qualitative and quantitative methods, UX metrics we can measure the UX of the product.
Before collecting data, it’s a good idea to outline a basic measurement strategy.
- Decide which metrics to measure.
- Use both qualitative and quantitative metrics.
- Establish clear timeframes in order to gather data ( The metrics gathered in a single day may tell a much different story than those gathered over the course of a week.)
Here are some of the metrics to measure User experience:
1. Task Success Rate
The task success rate is one of the most widely used and easily understood UX metrics. It shows the percentage of participants that successfully complete a task
Tasks like completing a signup process or adding a specific item to a shopping cart are well-suited for this metric.
2. Task Error Rate
Error rate defines the percentage of bad entries made by users. It’s calculated by dividing the number of errors by the number of attempts made. High error rates indicate usability problems.
3. Task Completion Time
This metric measures the amount of time it takes a user to complete a task. Due to various factors, different users will take different times for the same task. In general, the less time a user spends on a task, the better the UX.
There are multiple ways to determine task completion time.
Average Time on Task: The total average time that users spend on a task
Average Completion Time: Calculating of Only users who actually complete the task
Average Time to Failure: The average amount of time that it takes users to give up or complete a task incorrectly
4. Retention Rate
Retention rate is the percentage of users who reuse the product. But to measure the retention rate of a product accurately, there must be a clear definition of what actions and activities are retentions.
Actions or activities like logging in, visiting a web page, downloading/uploading files, using a key product feature, etc.
5. Conversion Rate
Conversion rate measures the percentage of users who perform and complete desired actions.
Actions like completing a registration process to making a purchase is a conversion action.
6. Satisfaction
Users’ satisfaction measures users’ overall fulfillment levels, and it can be tracked in various ways.
- Satisfaction surveys: Surveys allow companies to ask customers questions to understand their happiness levels.
- CSAT (Customer Satisfaction Score): At the end of surveys, many companies obtain this score by asking users to rate their overall satisfaction on a scale from 1–5.
- NPS (Net Promoter Score): NPS is calculated by asking users how likely they are to recommend a brand or a product on a scale from 1–10.
- CES (Customer Effort Score): CES is achieved by asking users to rate their effort levels. For example, “On a scale from extremely easy to extremely difficult, how would you rate your experience?”
- Social Media Monitoring: Tools like Mention and Google Alerts allow companies to see what people are saying about them on social platforms, blogs, and review sites.
HEART by Google
In 2010, the Google Research Team developed a framework to measure the success of products and features.
Measuring user experience on a small scale is relatively easy. Just by observing users, talk to them, ask them questions, etc., and get rapid feedback. But when it comes to large scale it is more difficult so the google research team designed a framework called HEART
- Happiness: How do people feel about a product? What’s their level of satisfaction with it?
- Engagement: How much and how often do people choose to interact with a product?
- Adoption: How many new users are acquired over a specific amount of time?
- Retention: How many existing users are retained over a specific amount of time?
- Task Success: What percentage of users are able to successfully complete a task?
Measuring the User Experience Makes a Difference
UX metrics provide data that allows designers to measure and compare the usability of digital products over time. They reveal areas of products that need to be improved and help designers evaluate decisions based on evidence rather than opinions.
Some companies measure user experience with different variants of design with different colors, fonts, and buttons, components.
Sometimes they also change the entire user journeys, new features, and functionality and test them in real-time and determine which one works best.
This type of process is also called as A/B test or Multivariate tests
During an experiment, we would typically test three or four variations of the design.
For example: If we have three variations of the landing page 25% of traffic goes to the control (the current website), 25% goes to variation one, 25% to variation two, and 25% to variation three.
Some Companies do an experiment on a set of users or a specific location to establish a level of certainty that our designs are Beneficial to both users and business
Because changing the design for all users may impact millions of users sometimes which leads to business problems.
Final thoughts
I haven’t covered every possible UX metric here, because frankly, that would take all week. I covered the most widely used UX metrics.
Thank you for reading!
Hope this will help you to understand how to measure user experience.
Do share your feedback with me at guruprakash43@gmail.com or tag me on Twitter at twitter.com/GuruAdimulam
