UX Metrics to Measure User Experience

User Experience
UX Metrics to Measure User Experience
Article by Maria Martin
Last Updated: February 15, 2024

UX metrics are essential tools for uncovering usability problems and areas where design could be improved within digital products, such as applications or websites. Employing a combination of task-based and study-level metrics offers a comprehensive assessment of the user experience.

Task-based metrics involve users performing specific actions, unveiling usability issues for targeted improvements. Meanwhile, study-level metrics provide a broader view of the overall user satisfaction, perceived usefulness, general usability, and the likelihood of recommendation and purchase.

Both approaches contribute valuable insights for design and user interface teams to refine and optimize the product.

What Are UX Metrics?

User experience (UX) metrics serve as indicators to assess the effectiveness of your product design strategy and monitor changes over time. With a continuously expanding array of metrics, determining the most valuable ones for your project is crucial.

Focusing on relevant metrics that align with your project goals ensures meaningful insights can be derived from the data without becoming overwhelmed by unnecessary information.

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How To Choose the Right UX Metrics for Your Product?

How to choose the right UX metrics for your product? The most common and effective way is the HEART framework developed by Google, and it offers a systematic approach to aligning metrics with goals, signals, and overall improvement. It comprises five parts: Happiness, Engagement, Adoption, Retention, and Task Success.

Happiness

Happiness metrics gauge users' sentiments toward your product, and it’s an important metric because customer satisfaction ultimately fosters loyalty and repeat business. The first part of the HEART framework emphasizes the goal of ensuring users perceive your product as enjoyable, helpful, and user-friendly. Positive indicators include favorable user feedback, perceived ease of use, and users recommending your product to others.

Measuring these signals involves tracking product ratings, survey results, and the widely used Net Promoter Score (NPS). NPS assesses users' likelihood to recommend your product on a scale of 1 to 10, with scores above zero indicating more promoters than detractors and top-rated companies often achieving scores of 70 or higher.

Engagement

Engagement metrics gauge how frequently or intensely users interact with your product. User engagement plays a vital role in contemporary software design philosophy, as maintaining user interest provides greater opportunities for sales generation, brand awareness, and more.

The key positive indicators for engagement are extended time spent on the product, active participation in newsletters and other communications, and recurrent visits to your product. Other metrics closely associated with user experience and engagement also include average session duration, open rate, and conversion rate.

Strategic design decisions contribute to enhancing these critical metrics. Conversely, suboptimal design choices can result in shorter session durations, lower open rates, and reduced conversion rates. Establishing clear conversion goals for various actions, such as visits, clicks, and purchases, is essential for effective engagement measurement.

Adoption

Adoption metrics measure the behavior and number of first-time users of a product or new feature. In the early stages of a product's life cycle, many businesses prioritize measuring adoption as a key UX metric.

Indicators of adoption include app downloads, account creation, and the utilization of new features, which can all be quantified.

It's worth noting that adherence to the HEART framework doesn't necessarily follow a sequential order, so while adoption is a middle step according to the framework, it’s often the first thing to focus on. For example, adoption usually precedes considerations of happiness or engagement in the business strategy.

Retention

Retention metrics quantify the number of returning users and customers. Once you successfully draw users to your product, it becomes crucial to retain them. Failure to do so can lead to a swift loss of relevance with consumers and hinder your organization's objectives. Consequently, the aim of retention within the HEART framework is to measure sustained user engagement or lack thereof over an extended period.

Notable indicators of retention include churn rate, renewal rate (with subscription-based products or services), and the frequency of repeat customers.

Task Success

Task success, one of the most common usability metrics, is used to measure the percentage of successfully completed tasks by users using your product or service, i.e., the task success rate. For example, you can quantify how many users completed an account creation process after commencing it. If the completion rate is low, some or all aspects of the process can be improved.

Other than the task success rate, crucial metrics closely monitored in relation to task success are time required for task completion and the error rate per user. Efficient tasks are characterized by effective completion within a concise timeframe.

Task-Based UX Metrics

These are the task-based user experience measurements:

Action UX Metrics

Action user experience measurement is anchored on usability, i.e., the UX satisfaction according to a product’s effectiveness and efficiency. This UX metric can be gathered via simulated tasks, such as usability assessments, research, and the observation of goal-based product performance.

Here are ways to measure user experience through actions:

  • Completion rate: It is a predetermined fundamental criterion of the task-based action metric. For instance, the representative users will rate their success in finding the correct product on a website’s search bar. They will use a binary UX metric wherein 1 means success and 0 stands for failure.
  • Findability rate: Its primary goal is to locate a piece of information, product, or function after a few clicks.
  • Time on Task: A standard user experience measurement of efficiency, this records how long it takes a participant user to complete a task.

The report should include meeting the success criteria (time to complete), total duration for all representative users (time on task), and failure to meet the success criteria (time until failure).

This is critical as 53% of online users tend to leave a website that fails to meet their expectations in less than 3 seconds.

  • Clicks and page views: This measures user experience and efficiency by the number of clicks it takes a user to accomplish a task. For example, repeatedly clicking on-page elements, buttons, and scroll bars can mean longer time spent on the task. It may reflect less efficiency.
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Attitudinal UX Metrics

The attitudinal UX metrics can be gathered through these short questionnaire types:

  • Single Ease Question (SEQ): a singular seven-item survey used to assess the level of ease or difficulty of use
  • Confidence: a test to see if online users believe they can complete a task successfully; this is conducted before and after respondents get a feel for the website or application

Behavioral and Physiological UX Metrics

These UX metrics involve eye-tracking in which you can determine a user’s areas of interest (AOIs), like menu labels, images, and advertisements.

Data collected through eye-tracking user experience metrics cover:

  • The dwell time or time spent on a particular AOI
  • The fixation count or the average amount of fixations on an AOI
  • The time until first fixation or the duration before the fixation count

Combined UX Metrics

Action and behavioral user experience metrics can create these other task-based UX metrics:

  • Single Usability Metric (SUM): This refers to the average completion rate, time on task, errors committed and occurred, and task-based user satisfaction. These factors should be weighed equally.
  • Learnability: It measures how easy learning and navigating a website or application interface is.
  • Change based on expectation: It can be a drop or an increase. A drop suggests a poorer-than-expected UX, while an increase means better-than-expected.

A design’s responsiveness and adaptiveness play a vital role in a product’s high usability and a consumer’s change in expectation.

Statistics show that over 83% of online users expect seamless website and app navigation. And bad usability results in disappointment, impacting UX significantly.

  • Lostness: You can calculate this user experience measurement according to the number of page views relative to the actual number of web pages. This showcases the convenience of finding information on an app or site.

Study-Based User Experience Metrics

Below are study-level user experience measurements:

Loyalty Metrics

Buyer and user intentions can measure expected loyalty. These are the two considerations:

  • Intent to purchase or use: Using a seven or ten-point scale, questionnaire respondents are asked to rate their level of intent to continue purchasing an item, subscription to an app or service, and using a website again.
  • Likelihood to recommend (LTR): It utilizes an 11-point system wherein 0 means a consumer will least likely recommend a brand, service, or product, while 10 suggests they will most likely refer you to other customers. You can find your product’s average LTR results by subtracting the lower number from the higher score.

Brand

Brand perception greatly influences other study-based UX metrics, such as loyalty, satisfaction, and convenience. Note these points to measure user experience:

  • Brand awareness: This evaluates how familiar consumers are with your brand name and product or service offers. Brand awareness and recognition assessment can be executed using aided and unaided awareness questions. In aided awareness, research participants will be supplied with a brand list from which they can choose those they know. In unaided awareness, they should provide the brand names based on the products and their categories.
  • Brand lift: This can determine how a client views a brand or business before and after using its website or application. It can result in either a “lift” (increase in customer and product satisfaction) or a “drag” (decrease in customer and product satisfaction).

User Trust

Customer trust is vital in a buyer’s decision to proceed with transacting with you on your application or website. This can be calculated according to the results of these two tests:

  • Standardized User Experience Percentile Rank Questionnaire (SUPR-Q): It is composed of two items to measure user experience—credibility and trustworthiness. You can use this to assess your overall brand performance or any interface if there are definitive values and attributes for reference.
  • Modified System Trust (MST) Scale: A 12-point survey, this user experience measurement identifies system reliability and perceived risk levels.

Visual Design

59% of online users favor a visually stunning website and app design. People tend to associate a great design with increased user-friendliness.

The key to delivering an outstanding UX is finding a balance between your product’s ease of use and visual attractiveness.

The user experience measurement for visual design involves buyer perceptions based on these assessment types:

  • SUPR-Q for appearance: Its results can tell a participant user’s attitude toward your site or app’s presentation. They will decide on its attractiveness and cleanliness or simplicity.
  • Clutter Questionnaire: This details a user’s perception of your product further. Clutter can be evaluated based on design elements, like your choice of typography, and the interface content, such as advertisement banners.

Usability and Usefulness

These are the three categories of perceived usability:

  • Traditional Usability: This tests the subjective components of an interface type and can be evaluated using any of these questionnaires:
    • System Usability Scale (SUS) questionnaire, one of the most widely used ten-item feedback forms to measure user experience based on perceived usability
    • Questionnaire for User Interaction Satisfaction (QUIS) with a short version (26 items) and a long version (71 items) for evaluating the respondents’ overall reaction to up to 11 specified interface elements
    • Post-Study System Usability Questionnaire (PSSUQ), its 16 agreement items help measure a product’s system usefulness, interface quality, and information quality
    • Software Usability Measurement Inventory (SUMI) with 50 questions to compute the subscales, namely, efficiency, helpfulness, learnability, and control
  • Web-Focused Usability: This is a concise and straightforward instrument that analyzes a consumer’s web experience. It measures the user experience according to these four UX attributes—appearance, usability, trust, and loyalty.
  • Pragmatic Usability: This pertains to the perceived ease of use and perceived value or utility of a product and can be calculated through one of the following:
    • Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) with 12 items to determine the likelihood of a program’s future use
    • Usability Metric for User Experience (UMUX), a four-point questionnaire recommended to be used together with the SUS questionnaire
    • Usability Metric for User Experience-Lite (UMUX-Lite), a two-item survey focusing on whether the product’s system capabilities can meet user demands

Key Takeaways on UX Metrics

Critical task-level user experience metrics are associated with user actions and attitudes toward a digital product. In contrast, study-level user experience measurements encompass consumer satisfaction, trust, loyalty, and brand perception.

In practice, UI/UX designers and other product questionnaire evaluators can mix these UX metrics to perform a more thorough examination and arrive at a more accurate analysis.

UX metrics are valuable tools for your design team to make informed decisions, track product performance, monitor progress, and communicate the impact of their output on the entirety of your business. UX specialists can deliver data-driven actionable reports based on insights derived from research measured against a set of user experience metrics.

UX Metrics FAQs

How is UX measured?

User experience is measured through metrics like task success rate, error rate, and user satisfaction scores from surveys. Analyzing user behavior, feedback, and usability testing helps gauge the effectiveness and efficiency of a product or service.

What is the difference between KPI and UX metrics?

Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are broader business metrics, such as revenue and conversion rates. UX metrics are specific to the user experience and focus on aspects like usability, efficiency, and satisfaction, providing detailed insights into the user's interaction with a product.

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