5 ways to measure your product’s UX
User experience is one of the most relevant areas of any product. It refers to how users feel when they’re using it and can make or break the success of a business or product. UX designers must focus on providing meaningful and relevant experiences to users that are aligned with business goals.
“No product is an island. A product is more than the product. It is a cohesive, integrated set of experiences. Think through all of the stages of a product or service — from initial intentions through final reflections, from the first usage to help, service, and maintenance. Make them all work together seamlessly.”
— Don Norman, inventor of the term “User Experience.”
Next quarter at Bravo, we will focus on optimising UX and fixing pain points that users are currently facing on multiple areas of the platform. We have gathered a number of issues categorised them by product stage and will be working on fixing them on the following months.
One of the key things of this process is to measure the impact of the changes and make sure that we improve meaningful metrics. So, which methods can we follow to measure UX?
1. User interviews
Get qualitative data talking to your users. It’s usually expensive both on time and cost, but valuable when done right. You will need to find a segment of users that have experienced the UX changes that are willing to be interviewed.
Interviews may be the best method to utilize if you need to understand the process by which a phenomenon occurs, like how a person makes a decision. Keys: define a clear goal, have a fluid conversation (it’s not a survey!) and keep an open mind about the participant’s perspective.
🗒 I’ve written an article on how we do user interviews at Bravo.
2. Usability testing
Observe your users interacting with your product, evaluate how they feel and identify opportunities. It’s important to check the context, equipment and logistics of the session, set the right tasks and to not interfere on the user’s process.
Same as user interviews, another key to usability testing is to choose the right users to participate in the testing. This means selecting users who are representative of the target audience of the product, and who have the skills and abilities needed to provide valuable feedback. By using the right users, it is possible to obtain more accurate and relevant results that can be used to measure the impact of the UX improvements.
3. Analyse behavioural metrics
Some of the metrics you can look when measuring UX can be those related to time to complete specific actions, number of times an event is triggered, % of users that reach certain milestones, number of errors, etc. You should select metrics that have impact in the short term in order to validate hypothesis as soon as possible. For example, I’d rather work on increasing conversion rates on early stages of the user journey than do it on retention, which might be affected for early issues.
If you are doing changes on UX (like us) make sure you use metrics with historical data so that you can compare the performance before and after the changes.
4. A/B testing
A/B testing is a technique that allows for the comparison of the performance of two or more variations of a product or design, and determining which is the most effective in terms of specific objectives. Keys: Set clear goals (for instance, increase the number of users who complete a specific task, increase the number of conversions), design the variations rigorously (ensure that they are controlled and relevant differences) and collect and analyse the data adequately (select the appropriate metrics, ensure that the sample is sufficiently large and representative to be able to draw reliable conclusions).
Note that A/B testing requires a significant amount of traffic to obtain precise and reliable results. Also conducting an A/B test requires detailed planning and analysis, and it can be costly to develop and maintain the variants in tests. Additionally, the performance of the variants in tests can be misleading, as they can be affected by external factors that have not been adequately controlled.
5. Support tickets
Quantifying support tickets is another method to detect UX problems on your product. Define themes and categories (and perhaps sub-categories) and look for patterns. Note that this task can be time-consuming with high volumes of data. Also keep in mind that only a small percentage of users contact support, so it’s important to combine other metrics to see the whole picture.
These are not the only methods that you can consider, but will help you to evaluate the experience of your users both qualitatively and quantitatively.
If your resources are limited and can’t spend much time following every method, I would go just with behavioural metrics analysis. Most probably you are already measuring those metrics and you will be able to see results in a short amount of time.
How do you measure UX? Let’s talk on Twitter
— Do you want to create an app with no-code? Try Bravo Studio
