Why should you use UX metrics?

If something is unmeasured, it cannot be improved. That’s why using UX metrics is so important. You can measure many aspects: level of user engagement, number of errors, time of completing the action, and many more. Everything depends on your product. Metrics are also one of the dimensions of the UXalliance Design Maturity Model. Why are they essential to building design maturity?

Learn more about your users

You can learn more about your users by doing research. It will help you discover users’ needs but also their behaviors. If you want to go more deeply into this topic, define the UX metrics you want to track. Why is it so important? Thanks to metrics you can objectively evaluate the activities you have conducted or the product changes you want to make. It will also give you a holistic view of the users’ experience. As a result, you will be able to focus on activities that have a real impact on your users. Remember that metrics won’t give you the answer on how to design something, but will help you define the direction of design.

Defining metrics

How should the metric be defined? First of all, it should be expressed clearly. It could be for example a percentage of invoices paid on time. Besides, it’s recommended to express it as a factor or ratio, e.g. the number of successful transactions to total transactions. A well-defined metric changes the way things are done, such as making users perform an activity more often. Last but not least, we should have a real impact on the value of the metric. Remember that defining metrics is just a first step. The most important is to use them in practice, analyze them regularly, and have an impact on their value.

Types of metrics

There are many types of metrics. The most important thing is to adjust them to your product and your needs. Here are some examples:

• Success metrics
• Issue-based metrics
• Performance metrics
• Psychological and behavioral metrics
• Self-reported/declarative metrics

Before defining metrics, think what you would like to achieve or improve. If you’d like to reduce the time to complete a task or change the lostness factor, you should probably focus on performance metrics. Do you observe recurring problems in your product? Think about using issue-based metrics. It could be, for example, the number of issues per stage or task. Do you want to check if users can complete tasks with success? Create success metrics. Everything depends on your product and the stage you are currently at.

Improve your product

Metrics are very often omitted. Product teams focus on day-to-day work and prioritize design and research. However, working in a competitive environment and with changing user needs in mind, you need to continuously improve your product. Using metrics will help you do this. If you want to learn more about metrics, check out the UX-PM Level 3 agenda.