UI UX

UX Metrics: What Matters When Measuring User Experience

Written byKarin Kelley
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Updated onJuly 22, 2024

Consider a website like Amazon. Its intuitive interface, personalized recommendations, and seamless checkout process make shopping easy and pleasant, encouraging repeat visits. Similarly, Apple’s products are renowned for their user-friendly design, contributing to its strong customer base and market dominance. In both cases, user experience (UX) has been vital in building the brand’s user trust and driving growth.

Today, UX directly impacts customer satisfaction, retention, and business success. A well-designed UX ensures that users find a product easy to use, efficient, and enjoyable, leading to higher engagement and loyalty. Therefore, it isn’t surprising that skilled UX designers are in high demand.

Learning about user experience metrics is essential if you’re an aspiring UX designer. This guide will explore the most critical UX metrics, the top tools for measuring them, and best practices. For those who want to gain more in-depth knowledge of UX metrics and other key concepts, we will recommend an industry-recognized UI UX design bootcamp.

What are User Experience Metrics, and Why are They Important?

UX metrics indicate how well a user interacts with the product and achieves a fruitful result. They quantify user feedback and behavior while accessing and using the product. These metrics help detect pain points and areas in need of improvement. They can then be used to modify the product and track the effect of the modifications on user experience.

The UX metrics are categorized in multiple ways, such as:

Quantitative and qualitative
Behavioral and attitudinal
Descriptive, perception, and outcome

They may have further sub-types like user satisfaction, usability, conversion rates, etc.

Regardless of the categorization, the UX metrics are crucial for gathering honest user feedback regarding the product. The feedback highlights flaws that may have been missed during testing or emerged during conditions specific to the user. You can include these use cases and possible scenarios for future product testing phases.

Further, UX metrics monitor product usage’s highs and lows and help identify why some users use the product for periods or why they stop using it altogether. Thus, UX metrics provide a gateway into the user’s mind.

Also Read: Guide: How to Write a UX Designer Resume

KPIs vs. UX Metrics: What’s the DIfference

Several UX designers use the terms KPIs and UX metrics interchangeably. However, there is a fine distinction between them. Simply put, UX metrics are operational measurements that give the number of users performing a specific activity, the value of customer satisfaction, or the net promoter score for a particular quarter. Meanwhile, the KPIs or key performance indicators are strategic goals that are quantified for tracking.

Further, user experience metrics are measured and recorded daily, while KPIs are calculated and reviewed quarterly, semi-annually, or annually.

For example, a UX metric of user experience would be the number of users completing a purchase. This metric is tracked every day, and the value is recorded.

A KPI would be the rate of change in the number of users over the last three months, calculated from the metric values recorded earlier.

Thus, UX metrics are necessary to develop and employ the KPIs. But which ones will you choose for your application?

Key User Experience Metrics to Measure

There is a wide range of UX metrics depending on the measurement objectives. As a UX designer, you must know what you want to measure and why you want to measure. An irrelevant metric will waste your time and become a red herring. Here are some popular UX metrics to help you start.

Net Promoter Score

Net promoter score (NPS) indicates how likely your users are to promote and recommend your product to their acquaintances. Depending on their likelihood to spread the word, users are categorized as detractors, passive users, or promoters.

Customer Satisfaction Score

Customer satisfaction score (CSAT) entails asking users to rate their satisfaction after they log out or complete their actions. This is a hugely popular metric, with every firm encouraging its customers to leave feedback using a link or a QR code.

Number of Active Users

The number of users that access your website or use your product regularly indicates its usefulness. For example, there may be a peak in the daily active users (DAU) during the weekends for a food ordering application. Meanwhile, the monthly active users (MAU) accessing the woolen clothes section of an apparel website may fall in the months of summer.

Further, the DAU/MAU ratio indicates how many users interact with your application daily every month.

Customer Churn Rate

Customer churn rate is the percentage of non-returning customers for a specified period. It is calculated using the formula given below:

Customer churn rate = (Number of customers at the beginning of the month – Number of users at the end of the month)/ Number of users at the start of the month.

Click-through Rate

Click-through rate (CTR) refers to the percentage of users clicking a call-to-action button or a specific link. If the buttons are unattractive or the link is not working, the CTR will be low, indicating a need to revisit the features.

Also Read: A Look at 10 Great UX Portfolio Examples

Usability Metrics for User Experience

Time-on-Task

Time-on-task is the time in seconds, minutes, or hours users spend completing a task. For example, a great website will direct the user to the exact product, take them to the purchase page, and finish the purchase within 5 to 10 minutes. Meanwhile, an average website may have issues with redirection to the payment gateway, delaying the purchase and resulting in the user leaving the website without purchasing anything. Thus, a low time-on-task indicates greater usability of the website.

Task Success Rate

Task success rate, or task completion rate, refers to the percentage of users who have finished a task successfully. You must know your exact tasks, such as filling out a survey, creating an account, completing a course, and finishing a challenge. Task success rate is calculated by dividing the number of successfully executed tasks by the total number of tries.

Test-level Satisfaction

Test-level satisfaction measures user satisfaction after a test session is completed. It employs the System Usability Scale, which asks users to answer ten statements with ratings from 1 to 5, with five being the highest. The ratings are analyzed to quantify the ease of use of the usability testing methods.

Top UX Measurement Tools

Selecting the right UX measurement tool determines the accuracy and usefulness of the UX metrics. Here are some top tools for you to choose from.

Qualaroo

Qualaroo lets you conduct usability testing to gather and assess customer feedback. You can use its NudgeTM feature to generate surveys that pop up on websites. You can integrate timers and monitor how they appear and process the users’ input.

ContentSquare

ContentSquare can capture performance and behavioral data in an automated and scalable manner. You only have to click a single button to access a detailed data analysis. It offers AI-enabled features to help set up alerts and reactions.

Usabilla

You can use Usabilla to gather real-time feedback from applications and websites. It provides an API to help you obtain the collected data for processing in your systems. Further, you can create widgets for comments to gauge the emotional aspects of the feedback.

Hotjar

Hotjar is an excellent tool for testing the usability of web applications. You can use screen recording and heat maps to scrutinize the visitor inputs. Further, it can be easily integrated with multiple CRMs and tools such as Zapier, Google Analytics, Slack, and OmniConvert.

Also Read: UI UX Portfolio Tips: How to Showcase Your Work and Skills

Best Practices for Measuring UX

Installing the correct tools and setting up appropriate measurements of user experience metrics are crucial. However, you must also follow certain best practices to add value to your measurement. Here’s what you can do.

Determine the UX metrics most suitable for your product
Ensure the tool of your choice can gather, calculate, and visually represent the metrics
Define the objectives of collecting customer feedback and how you will use them
Establish benchmarks and metrics limits
Set alerts to indicate if a metric value reduces or increases beyond the limits
Plan actions for unfavorable metric values, such as reaching out to dissatisfied customers who gave a low CSAT score
Explore different analysis techniques to gain further insights into the metrics
Choose a suitable visualization format to view and assess the trends clearly

Enroll and Become a UI UX Designer

UX metrics have emerged as crucial linchpins in the operation. They determine how well the product is received and highlight any inadequacies that may have fallen through the cracks.

Aspiring UI/UX designers must be conversant with UX metrics to make educated decisions about the design of their products. They must understand the features that work and how to measure their impact. This requires a deep understanding of the fundamentals of UI UX design and its industry applications.

You should also consider a comprehensive UI UX design bootcamp that includes essential topics such as user experience design, factors influencing user experience, prototyping and styling, wireframing, and user testing.

This course will help you hone clickstream analysis, design thinking, empathy mapping, Gestalt principles, and heuristic evaluation skills. You will also work with industry experts on Capstone projects and learn critical UX tools such as Figma, Sketch, and Balsamiq.