The Complete Guide to UX Metrics

In business, keeping tabs on your customer’s experiences is always a good idea — after all, a terrible user experience affects your bottom line. Measuring UX metrics is an effective way to determine the overall user experience of your clients.

There are several metrics to measure user experience, and each metric indicates a different part of the user experience. But before we dive into which metrics you should choose for your company, let’s look at UX metrics and how to use them.

Table of Contents

• What are UX metrics?
• UX Metrics You Should Measure
• Best Practices for Measuring UX

What are UX metrics?

You know the importance of good data in sales and marketing. Good, quantitative data can help you plan future sales and marketing initiatives. However, sometimes you need to look past the marketing data and consider how humans behave and interact with your product or service. Your marketing initiatives no longer matter if a user’s experience is subpar.

That’s why you need UX metrics.

UX metrics are quantitative and qualitative data points collected to track, measure, and compare the user experience of a website or application. These metrics reflect the attitudes and behaviors of real people. Attitudes and behaviors can be somewhat difficult to quantify but can be measured by things like:

• How often a user clicks a particular link.
• Page loading speeds.
• Task completion time.

A good look at UX metrics will give you a general sense of the user’s overall experience with your product. UX metrics help align customer satisfaction with your company’s business goals. Ultimately, they should be used as an indicator for updates and improvements to your product or service to increase customer satisfaction.

UX Metrics You Should Measure

When considering your customer’s experience and which metrics to measure for, it is important to understand you are not necessarily measuring KPIs. KPIs, or key performance indicators, measure the overall success of your business strategy.

Sure, user experience and customer satisfaction significantly affect your company’s success. However, UX metrics are the overall measure of a user’s experience.

Three categories often define UX metrics. UX metrics are categorized by:

• Descriptive. These UX metrics reflect how a user behaves when using your product.
• Behavioral. While similar to descriptive metrics, take a closer look at how customers interact and engage with your service. (Think, page clicks or downloads.)
• Attitudinal. Describes a user’s overall perception or attitude when engaging with your product or service.

Think of UX metrics as an indicator of what should be improved to make your product or service more intuitive or easier to use for your customer. If you improve a customer’s experience, chances are high you’ll see better KPIs, too.

Here are four UX metrics you should measure to get an overall sense of your customer’s experience.

Usability

You know your product is a valuable tool for your customers, but how easy is it for them to use? To answer this question, you need to look at usability, a UX metric.

The usability UX metric can be defined as the ease of use of your product or service. For example, to test for usability, you might have a select group of users complete a task within your product. An observer watches, records, and compares the behavior of the users completing the task.

The data you collect for this metric will help determine the efficiency and effectiveness of your product or service.

There are several ways to measure usability, and how you measure it depends upon your product or service. However, here are common UX metrics for usability.

Efficiency

If you want to know how well a feature within your product works, a critical UX metric to consider is efficiency. Efficiency measures how well a user can complete a task within your product. You should measure task completion rate.

• Task completion rate. Calculate this by averaging the time it takes test users to complete a task and dividing the average by the total number of participations. This UX metric is beneficial to know and track when making changes and updates to your product.
• Hint: You may want to compare the task completion rate times of experienced users to new users. Use the experienced user data points as the baseline data.
• Success score. This metric reflects the question, “Were users able to complete a set task?” Calculate the success score by dividing the number of completed tasks by the total number of attempts. The higher the number, the higher the success rate of the users testing your product.
• Number of errors. This UX metric can measure the total number of mistakes or individual error occurrences. To calculate this, you’ll want to divide the total number of errors by the total number of possible errors. Hopefully, your product has fewer errors, but errors are expected.

Effectiveness

Effectiveness measures if users can fully complete the designated goal. Like efficiency, you will want to measure effectiveness if you are updating or upgrading your product or service. Ideally, you should measure for effectiveness before making any changes to have baseline data to compare to future data sets.

To measure effectiveness, look at data relating to:

Customer Satisfaction

Customer satisfaction is an essential UX metric. Customer satisfaction metrics are both qualitative, meaning you can collect data from your customers by asking open-ended survey questions, and quantitative. The data you collect will help you understand what your product is doing right and wrong and what can be improved.

Fortunately, there are several metrics to consider when measuring customer satisfaction. Here are just a few to consider.

Customer Satisfaction Score (CSS)

Collect this data by sending a survey to all your users. You might collect data through a survey pop-up that asks users to rate their experience using the emoji chart or by picking a number on the scale.

Be sure to include open-ended questions in your survey. This will give users a chance to provide feedback. After you have collected enough data, you will have a good indicator of customer satisfaction.

Single Ease Question (SEQ)

This one-question survey usually asks, “Overall, how difficult was this task?” The Single Ease Question considers that the task completion time metric may be inaccurate. Users may have legitimate reasons to complete a task at a slower rate.

By asking this question, you’ll understand the ease of the tasks within your product. Users should choose the best answer for the task’s difficulty based on their experience. Typically, one means the task was very difficult, and ten represents the task was extremely easy.

You’ll want an average response of 5 to this question.

Net Prompter Score (NPS)

Use this metric to determine your customers' loyalty to your product or service. This metric is easy to decide on, too. Simply ask your customer base, “How likely are you to recommend this product to a friend or coworker?” The higher the number, the more loyal your customers are.

Customer Churn Rate (CCR)

Determining the churn rate is one good indicator of how well your customers receive your product. The churn rate reflects the number of customers that immediately leave your website.

To calculate this rate, you’ll need to define a timeframe. For example, you may want to look at just a six-month window. Then, subtract the number of customers from the end of the period from the number at the beginning. Next, divide that number by the number of customers at the beginning of the timeframe. This number is your churn rate.

Engagement

No matter the type of product or service you offer, it is essential you get a measurement of how engaged your customers are with your brand. If your engagement starts to lack due to user experience, that could spell bad news for your company.

Instead, measure these metrics for user experience to stay ahead of any adverse trends:

Page Views

The number of page views your website receives in a designated time frame is an easy metric to determine engagement. Start tracking this metric for several months. The first month’s data will be the baseline data point.

Ideally, you will want to see an upward trend in page views. If the trend becomes negative, that is a sign your customers are no longer engaging with your content.

Session Duration

This metric is also a good indicator of engagement. Session duration measures the time customers spend on your website or page. An engaged customer will spend more than a few seconds interacting with your content. If the session duration metric is low, you know you have a slight problem.

User Feedback

This metric can be measured in a couple of ways. Take a look at the number of comments on your website. An active comment section means your customers are engaged with the content. Alternatively, send your customers an open-ended survey.

Business Impact

Ultimately, the user experience directly relates to your business’s overall goals. If the user experience is poor, your business will likely see a decline in revenue. Instead of leaving it up to chance and hoping the user experience of your product is sufficient, there are ways to measure the business impact of the customer experience.

With the data in hand, you can make appropriate adjustments or changes to your product or service to ensure the user experience positively impacts your business goals.

To measure for business impact, take a look at these metrics (again, this is not an exhaustive list of the metrics you can measure for business impact).

Conversion Rates

Conversion rates are a good indicator of the business impact of your user’s experience. If you offer a product or service with an additional upgrade, you can measure how many users upgrade to the paid product— don’t.

Depending on the result, you can determine if changes need to be made to improve user experience.

Revenue and Sales

You’ll need a baseline number for sales and revenue to accurately account for this metric. Keep track of your sales after each update or improvement to determine how those updates change your overall revenue.

Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)

Customer Lifetime Value measures how valuable a customer is to your company. Meaning how much money does each customer spend with your company? In general, older customers are less expensive to keep than gaining new ones. Therefore, try to keep these customers retained.

ROI

Every business should be accustomed to measuring the Return on Investment. To determine how the ROI is affected by user experience, compare the total amount of time, effort, and funds spent on user experience compared to the overall business. This will give you a good idea of the user experience's impact on your ROI.

Measuring UX metrics and keeping up with the data can feel overwhelming. However, there are tools, like HubSpot’s Customer Journey Analytics tool, to help you keep track of and compare UX metric data.

Best Practices for Measuring UX

Measuring UX metrics should be an essential part of your business strategy. After all, your customer’s experience is a critical player in the success of your product. There are numerous UX metrics to measure for, but not every metric will be a valuable insight to your company.

Consider these best practices and tips to gain the most value from UX metrics.

If you’re ready to learn more about user experience, check out our Ultimate Guide to Designing for the User Experience.

1. Define measurable goals.

Before measuring any part of the user experience, you should define clear, measurable goals. Your goals will ultimately help you pick the best metric to measure. For example, if you wanted to increase user speed through a contact form, you might determine the task completion rate first.

Using this information, you can select a reasonable goal and the means to measure it.

Pro tip: Writing your goals with our SMART goals template will help you ensure your goals are specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound.

2. Obtain baseline data.

The point of UX metrics is to determine which part of the user experience is lacking— that way, you can work to improve the overall experience. But before you make improvements, you should first collect baseline data.

Baseline data will be your reference point to compare a change in user experience based on the changes you make to your product or service.

Pro tip: Make sure you set a specific length of time for each metric you wish to measure. After you establish the timeframe, keep it the same throughout your tests. This will give you an accurate data set.

3. Measure multiple UX metrics.

When determining user experience, it is always a good idea to look at user experience and measure for various UX metrics. One metric will not give you a good reading of the user experience. You need a diversified data set to provide you with a clearer picture.

Pro tip: Choose various UX metrics to give your company a clear understanding of the user experience.

4. Measure for qualitative and quantitative metrics.

Qualitative metrics, like customer feedback surveys and Single Ease Questions, can sometimes tell you more than a single number. Qualitative metrics allow for open-ended discussion between you and your customers.

For example, a survey lets you learn about customer pain points and potential solutions. Quantitative data, on the other hand, is also essential. This kind of data will provide you with a solid understanding of performance concerning business goals. You need both of these kinds of metrics when researching user experience.

Pro tip: Choose both quantitative and qualitative UX metrics. This will provide a solid understanding of your customer’s experience with your product.

Getting Started

User experience can determine the success of your product or service. Fortunately, UX metrics allow you to determine overall user experience. Use these metrics to help guide and implement changes to your product or service. Be sure only to implement changes that will improve your customers’ experience.