How to measure the quality of User Experience (UX)
Measuring User Experience of a (digital) product can become annoying — if you don’t know how to manage. But why the effort to do so?
Let’s start with a simple definition of what User Experience (aka. UX) actually is:
User Experience (UX) is about all aspects of user interactions with your company, services or products. It describes expectations, appreciation and reactions happening before, during and after the actual interaction. — ux-feedback.com
Regarding that definition, User Experience is all about how the user feels and interacts with your product. So let’s start with five metrics to measure our User Experience.
1. Happiness
Only happy users can convert to paying customers so that is our first metric we need to measure. We need to measure the user attitude for example through surveys. Metrics could be Satisfaction, perceived ease of use or net-promoter score. Of course, surveys aren’t the only and probably not the best method to track these metrics.
2. Engagement
We can track the level of user involvement through tracking the number of visits per user per week but also through the number of uploads per user per day or numbers of shares. This depends on your product.
3. Adoption
The adoption of a new feature or product means how well it is gaining new users. Examples could be upgrades to a new version, new subscriptions or purchases by new users.
4. Retention
As we know how the retention is (aka. the rate existing users are returning) we know that users probably love our product — or not! As always I have some examples for you: Number of active users remaining present over time, renewal rate or failure to retain over time (churn!) or repeat purchases.
5. Task success
Last but not least is the task success rate. Well, as you can imagine if the user is not able to succeed with his task using your product — your product is dumb and your churn rate will raise (nobody wants a churn rate of 100%)! So the task success is about efficiency and effectivity: Have the user found something valuable through his search? Was the user able to upload a picture within seconds or minutes (and not hours)?
You don’t need to use all of these five metrics. It depends on your product and your needs or goals you want to reach with a feature or product. For success you should pick one or two of them and define goals and signals so you can derive metrics from them. I will write another post especially about that process.
