Do you want to know how to choose the right UX metrics for your product? Online, almost every user action creates a data point that can be measured and analyzed in context with the rest of your website or mobile app. The good news for developers and product designers is that there are several User Experience metrics that can be analyzed to determine the success of particular designs and features.
However, collecting data does your team little good if they don’t know what UX metrics equal success. This post will explain standard key metrics many organizations track and how your business can choose the right metrics to measure success.
Choosing the Right UX Metrics for Your Product
The most critical aspect of choosing the right UX metrics is understanding your organization’s goals and digital product. For example, is your primary goal to attract as many active users as possible, or do you want users to complete specific actions like creating an account or purchasing a subscription or item?
Businesses develop websites, mobile applications, and other digital assets for many different reasons. Therefore, before you define the key metrics for your product, you need to define your organization’s goals. Ideally, these goals should have been clearly defined before development and deployment.
Without knowing the specifics of your digital product or business, we can’t tell what goals you might have. However, most companies seek to sell products or services, engage users, and create brand awareness with their websites and apps. Your business is likely trying to do the same. Still, there are situations where your goals might be more nuanced.
If you are having difficulty defining the goals of your product, speak with your internal teams, key stakeholders, and users to learn more about the value they derive from your company’s digital product.
The Heart Framework
You can use the HEART framework to help find the right UX metrics for your product. Google developed the HEART framework to help organizations define UX metrics most important to them. Using this framework, your business can understand the connection between goals, signals, and metrics. It will give you an idea about what aspects of your product can be tweaked or improved to better reach your company’s goals. The HEART framework is broken into five parts:
- Happiness
- Engagement
- Adoption
- Retention
- Task success
We will explain each facet of the HEART framework, what goals each section applies to, and what metrics are best used to measure the User Experience of each aspect of the framework.
Happiness
Happiness metrics measure how your users feel about your product. Customer satisfaction leads to loyal, repeat customers, so the metrics related to user happiness are closely monitored by many organizations. The underlying goal of happiness in the HEART framework is users find your product fun, helpful, and easy to use.
The key signals that indicate your product is doing well in this regard are positive user feedback, perceived ease of use, and user recommendations of your product to friends and family. The UX metrics that measure these signals are average app or product rating, positive survey results, and a high Net Promoter Score.
The Net Promoter Score (NPS) is one of the best ways businesses can measure customer satisfaction. Net Promoter Score asks users how likely they are to recommend your product to someone else on a scale of 1 to 10. Your NPS is calculated by taking the users who respond with a six or less and subtracting them from those who respond with a nine or higher. Any score above zero means you have more promoters than detractors. Top-rated companies have Net Promoter Scores of 70 or higher.
Engagement
Engagement metrics measure the frequency or intensity of user engagement with your product. User engagement is a critical part of modern software design thinking. Keeping users engaged with your product gives your business more opportunity to make sales, create awareness, etc. The driving goal of engagement in the HEART framework is for users to enjoy your product’s content and continue to engage with it.
The key signals indicative of strong engagement levels are spending more time on the product, opening newsletter emails and other communications, and returning visits to your product. The UX metrics most tied to engagement are average session length, open rate, and conversion rate.
Intelligent design choices increase these key metrics. Poor design choices will lead to low session length, poor open rates, and low conversion rates. It is crucial to set conversions for various tasks, such as visits, clicks, and purchases.
Adoption
Adoption metrics measure the number of first-time visitors or users. Many businesses focus on adoption at the earliest stages of their product’s life cycle because they need users.
Key signals of adoption include downloading the app, creating an account, and using new features. Therefore, the right UX metrics for measuring adoption are download rate, new visitors, registration rate, and feature adoption rate.
Your organization can’t focus on the other UX metrics until you have people using your product. That said, it is essential to note that the HEART framework doesn’t have to be followed in order. Your business will have to focus on adoption before considering happiness or engagement.
Retention
Retention metrics measure the number of return users and customers. Once you attract users to your product, it is vital to retain them. If your product fails to retain users, it will very quickly lose relevance with consumers and fail to meet your organization’s goals. Therefore, the goal of retention in the HEART framework is repeated user engagement over time.
Key retention signals that your organization can look for include user loyalty levels and renewals. The best UX metrics for retention are churn rate, renewal rate, and repeat customers. These metrics give your business an idea of how often users return to your digital product and how many customers buy new offerings.
Task Success
Task success metrics measure a user’s ability to complete desired actions. For example, the last thing your organization will want is a product that doesn’t allow customers to check out, pay for items, register a new account, etc. Therefore, task success is critical to the overall User Experience of your product.
The key metrics organizations have to watch closely related to task success are completion rate, time to task completion, and error rate per user. Tasks are efficient when they can be completed effectively in a short amount of time. Therefore, take the time to see how many users complete tasks and how long it takes them to do so.
Final Thoughts
The right UX metrics are vital to ongoing design and product improvement. If you are unsure whether a change will benefit your product, A/B test it to find the best design solution. A digital product’s UX is one of the most critical components of success. If you want to learn more about how to choose the right UX metrics for your product, reach out to an experienced app development partner.