The Best User Experience Metrics and KPIs To Measure It
When it comes to your business, your customers’ user experience (UX) of the products, systems, applications or services, you’ve released or continue to work on will have a major impact on your future success and growth. So, you need to ensure that your UX is as good as you can make it.
From how easy it is to navigate, to how simple it is to use and much more. There’s lots to think about when it comes to the user experience associated with a product or service.
But how do you know whether you’re delivering the right UX, or any improvements you’ll need to make to it?
Well, that starts with measuring your customers’ UX and focusing on some of the best metrics and KPIs, to help get you the insights you need.
Stay tuned, as was take you through six of the most popular attitudinal and behavioural UX metrics and KPIs that could help you with this during 2024.
Attitudinal UX KPIs
When we refer to attitudinal UX metrics, we’re essentially talking about measuring users’ perception of your products or services, by focusing on their subjective opinions and feelings.
These types of metrics help to uncover user expectations, preferences and emotional reactions, which you can use to inform your design decisions and create more user-centric experiences.
Some of the important attitudinal UX metrics include the following.
Net promoter score (NPS)
The NPS metric looks to measure the likelihood of your users’ recommending your product or service to a friend or colleague, which is achieved by asking that user the following simple rating-scale question.
‘On a scale of 0 – 10, how likely is it that you would recommend our products | services | company to a friend or a colleague? (on the basis that 0 represents not likely and 10 very likely)
Each score is then grouped into the following classifications.
- 9-10 – Promoters (which represents those who love your company and actively promote it)
- 7-8 – Passives (who are those that like your company but don’t love it yet)
- 0-6 – Detractors (those who are unhappy with your business and are at real risk of churning)
To work out your NPS score, you simply need to subtract your number of detractors from your number of promoters. This will leave you with a positive or negative number, which you will then have to divide by your total number of survey responses and then multiply by 100. You’ll be left with a number that lies between 100 and –100, where the higher your score the more desirable it will be.
For a simpler and quicker way of calculating this, you might like to try our NPS calculator instead.
Customer satisfaction (CSAT)
The customer satisfaction (CSAT) survey and it’s CSAT metric is the standard way to measure customer satisfaction. And as such, it can be an effective of way of figuring out what parts of your product or service your customers are satisfied or unsatisfied with.
Your CSAT can be easily worked out by asking each customer to answer the following question.
‘How satisfied were you with our product or service?
Every customer is then invited to rate their satisfaction on a 5-point scale ranging from very dissatisfied to very satisfied.
Your CSAT can then be calculated by dividing all the positive responses you’ve received by your total number of responses and then multiplying this figure by 100, to leave you with a CSAT percentage.
From this the scores closest to 100% will demonstrate your highest levels of satisfaction, while those at the other end of the scale the lowest satisfaction levels.
Again, similar to NPS, we can offer a quicker and more convenient way of working out your score by trying our CSAT score calculator.
System usability scale (SUS)
The final attitudinal UX metric we will look at is the System Usability Scale (SUS), which is a reliable, simple to use tool for measuring an end users’ perception of how usable and user-friendly a product is.
The SUS metric consists of a 10-part questionnaire that employs a 5-point Likert scale (from 1 – strongly disagree to 5 strongly agree) for each item. Participants are required to rate their level of agreement with each statement, with the scores then calculated to produce a final SUS score ranging from 0 to 100, where the higher the score the better perceived its system usability.
The SUS questionnaire is based on the following questions:
- I believe I would like to use this system frequently
- I found this system unnecessarily complex
- I thought the system was simple to use
- I feel I would need the support of a technical person to be able to use this system
- I thought the various functions in this system were well integrated
- I thought there was too much inconsistency with this system
- I would guess that most people would learn to use this system very quickly
- I found the system to be very clunky to work with
- I felt very confident using the system
- I found myself needing to learn a lot of things in order to get going with this system
There are a number of benefits to using the SUS metric, which include:
- Simplicity – it's pretty simple to administer and understand, making it easy to implement, even for those who aren’t experts in usability testing
- Reliability – widely tested, the metric has proven to be a reliable tool for assessing usability across various types of systems and user groups
- Versatility – the metric can be used to evaluate a wide range of products and services such as websites, software applications, hardware devices and more
- Cost-effectiveness – given that it’s a self-administered questionnaire, the SUS offers a cost-effective means of collecting usability data compared to more resource-intensive methods
Behavioural UX KPIs
In contrast to the attitudinal approach to UX measurement, behavioural UX metrics help you to identify how users interact with your product and the problems they may face as they’re completing tasks.
These measures are quantitative in nature, providing data on user actions and behaviours such as click-through rates, time on task, task success rates, error rates and navigation paths.
Behavioural metrics can also help identify patterns, trends and potential pain points with the user experience, as well as offering measurable data to help drive your UX design decisions.
Some of the most popular behavioural UX metrics include the following.
Task success rate (TSR)
The TSR metric measures the effectiveness of a product or a feature by highlighting the percentage of users who are able to complete a task in a study.
The TSR can be calculated through calculating the volume of users who completed the task by the total number of users who attempted that task, and then multiplying the result by 100 to express it as a percentage.
Calculating the TSR is important for a number of reasons.
Pinpointing usability issues
Through tracking your TSR, you’re better able to identify specific tasks that users struggle with, which may include usability issues. Doing this can help you to prioritise areas for improvement and address problems more efficiently.
Benchmarking
The TSR can also be used to benchmark the performance of a product against its previous versions or even your competitors.
Justification of ROI
Highlighting improvements in your TSR, can also help you to explain your return on investment (ROI) for UX initiatives to stakeholders, by giving you a quantifiable measure for the impact of those design changes.
Time to task completion (TTC)
The TTC metric looks to measure the amount of time it takes users to complete a specific task or action within your application or website.
TTC is a vital metric, as it helps you to understand the usability and overall effectiveness of a specific design or feature, while also identifying where your users could be experiencing difficulties.
Further reasons why you might want to calculate TTC include.
Usability evaluation
With a shorter TTC, you’re able to deduce that users can accomplish their goals relatively quickly, suggesting that your interface is well-designed and user-friendly. By contrast, a longer TTC may indicate usability issues, confusion, or complex interactions that require further investigation and a potential redesign.
Benchmarking
By comparing TTC values across different designs, competitors or iterations, you’ll be able to establish performance benchmarks and identify areas for improvement.
Identifying pain points
Analysing TTC can reveal problematic interactions or steps within a task that can help enable your designers to address these issues and improve the user experience.
Examining learnability
By measuring TTC over multiple attempts, it can give you an insight into how quickly users learn to use an interface or feature effectively.
User error rate (UER)
With the UER you can identify how often your users make mistakes while using your product, system or interface.
This metric is ideal for helping researchers and designers figure out which parts of their design are challenging or confusing for users, so they can make improvements and create a better experience.
To calculate your UER, you simply need to divide your total number of errors for all users against the total number of task attempts. Then you multiple this by 100 to get a final percentage figure.
Here are some further reasons why you might want to measure UER.
Pinpoint usability issues
By employing the UER, it can help you identify problem areas that might be confusing to users and cause them to make errors.
Assess design effectiveness
When you track your UER over time or compare it across different designs, it can help you to evaluate the effectiveness of your design changes and iterations. A decrease in UER indicates that the modifications you made have improved user performance.
Benchmark performance
The UER can also serve as a benchmark that allows you to compare the usability of different products, systems or interfaces to identify best practices and inform the design of future products.
Inform training and documentation
It can help you to identify what level of additional training or support materials you might require to help users use your product more effectively, particularly if you have a high UER.
Prioritise development resources
When you measure your UER, it can help you to identify and prioritise areas where improvements are needed, so you can allocate development resources more effectively.
Final thoughts
We hope you enjoyed reading this blog. And if you weren’t already familiar with it, you’re now better informed about your customers’ user experience.
Remember, a great user experience is the cornerstone of any successful product or service. So, if you can incorporate as many of the metrics and KPIs we’ve discussed in this piece as you can, it should help you to develop a better UX for your customers. There’s never been a better time to get started.
