Data makes better products, period! Part 1/3
Continuous improvement of your digital product or service is vital to user satisfaction, and only possible when you set relevant goals.
User satisfaction is vital to the success of any digital product or service, but many suffer an imbalance of need (What do my users require?) versus delivery (What can I provide to my users now?). Instead, digital services should be understood and treated as “living”. They need continuous improvement to maintain relevance to users, or risk extinction.
So, what can your company do to reach (and maintain) this balance, all while continuously improving? I believe it can be achieved by starting with a cross-functional team defining clear, motivating and ambitious goals that are user-centric and consider all internal stakeholders.
At Sclable, we build out these goals with HEART, a Google framework originally created for UX improvement. It focuses on defining comprehensive user-driven goals and working to achieve them, all while ensuring continuous discovery of user needs. HEART combined with the Goals-Signals-Metrics process helps ensure companies have the right data and use it at the right time to make users happy by considering the following categories:
Happiness (user satisfaction)
Engagement (intensiveness of use)
Adoption (acceptance of new features)
Retention (likelihood of return use)
Task Success (fulfillment of immediate user needs)
Depending on the product’s target audience, not all (user-driven) goal categories are relevant, and others can be added, in particular for business-driven goals e.g. Quality, Time and Effort.
Going from goals to signals to metrics
The tricky thing about goals is that they often aren’t measurable, but you need quantifiable metrics to understand if you’re achieving them. In these cases, our team applies the Goals-Signals-Metric process to identify “signals” and derive corresponding metrics. Signals are user activities or events that can be captured with data to drive measurability of your goals.
Here’s an example for one goal and one metric of an online newspaper:
Goal: Ensure published content is relevant for new users
Signals: Number of sessions, session duration, registration date
Metric: In their first month after registering, at least 50% of (new) users have more than 10 sessions
In sum, starting with goals developed with HEART and following up with Goals-Signals-Metrics ensures our clients’ expectations are well covered, while the corresponding metrics are relevant, clearly defined, simple to understand, measurable, comparable over time, actionable and ownable. Once they’re set, it’s important to communicate them company-wide and accept challenges to them, so that they can be prioritized (and reprioritized) to suit the continuous improvement of your product or service. Finally, because less is more when it comes to metrics, I encourage you to consider setting a “North Star” metric.
You’re probably asking now, “How do I measure these metrics?” Check out Part 2 of my series!
