Improve Your key metrics: How UX Testing Can Boost Key Metrics

User experience is an important factor for a business that relies on a website or a web service to operate – and let’s face it, nowadays, most do, in one way or another.

But how to know if everything works as well as it can? You need to measure the UX performance, and that’s what KPIs and UX metrics are for. They’ll allow you to evaluate whether you need to make any changes to your product and provide you with the information you need to set strategies, plans, and goals for the future.

Data provides the foundation for metrics. To gather and adequately analyze that data, you’ll need good software – a user research platform such as our PlaybookUX.

It helps you conduct user tests, such as unmoderated and moderated testing or card sorting and tree testing. Thanks to great tagging and search systems, you can use PlaybookUX as a UX research repository that enables you to save and organize the information you gather during user research in one place. Want to check it out? Sign up for a 7-day trial we’re currently offering.

If you want more information about KPIs and usability metrics, read on – we’ll explain all the essential details to help you improve your product and achieve your business goals.

What are UX metrics?

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UX metrics are data indicators that allow you to see whether your product strategy is working as intended in terms of user experience. They’re also known as PX (product experience) or usability metrics.

Compared with financial or marketing metrics, they can sometimes be challenging. They reflect human behavior, which means UX metrics are subjective. However, without them, you don’t know if you have reached your goals and whether your strategy needs adjustment or not.

There are two main types of UX metrics:

• Behavioral – they focus on the interaction between the user and the product and are primarily quantitative
• Attitudinal – they allow you to understand better how users feel about the solution and what they say about it. They’re qualitative – primarily based on user feedback

It’s also possible to categorize UX metrics according to what they measure:

• Usability metrics give you an insight into how easily (or not) people accomplish tasks on your website
• Engagement metrics show what impact the website has on the users and how much they want to interact with it
• Conversion metrics are the most important – they focus on users who are ready to become paying customers

UX metrics and KPIs are essential tools in your arsenal, so use them to your advantage. Let’s dive into details about KPIs.

What are KPIs in UX?

KPIs or Key Performance Indicators are metrics you can use to measure your company’s long-term performance and success. These are the key statistics for your business. A KPI always has to be measurable – quantitative – so you can evaluate your organization against its competition.

What is the difference between UX metrics and KPIs?

The difference is subtle, but it’s there – and it’s important. Unlike KPIs, UX metrics aren’t always objective – attitudinal metrics illustrate the feelings and opinions of users, so you can’t use them to evaluate the effectiveness of your company against other organizations. However, some quantitative UX metrics can be KPIs – Task Success Rate and Task Time are good examples.

Why are UX metrics important for product development?

UX metrics help identify positive and negative patterns so you can guide your product in the right direction. Concentrating on specific metrics can help you understand which data types are valuable to your company so you can focus your efforts and use usability testing more constructively.

User metrics warn when there’s something wrong with your product and give you additional context, which is useful when you plan user interactions and user journeys.

How do you choose UX metrics to track your success?

The choice of UX metrics will depend on the nature of your business. For example, a website that makes money via advertisement will probably want to track the number of unique users, time on site, or engagement metrics.

On the other hand, online stores will be most interested in bounce rates, conversion rates, NPS, and metrics that give information about some of the technical aspects of the site (time to load, etc.).

It’s also worth noting that in large companies, all departments should decide which metrics to track – it’s a good idea to start with a brainstorming session and see what everyone has to say about the subject.

Thanks to that, you can avoid a situation when one part of the organization tracks a statistic that can be useful to other teams but doesn’t share the data.

15 most important UX metrics to track in 2022

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There are many UX metrics that you can track to get an insight into how your business operates. Here are the key metrics to measure in 2022:

1. CSAT (Customer Satisfaction Score) – you can measure CSAT through surveys, in which the customer answers questions regarding their satisfaction with your brand, product, or specific features you want to evaluate. You can quickly identify issues if you get negative answers to particular questions.
2. Apdex (Application Performance Index) – it’s one of the most objective user monitoring metrics. It considers the response time on user requests and measures the level of satisfaction of users who interact with your website.
3. Unique Visitors – this is one of the most popular engagement metrics. Unique visitors are different people who visited your site in a given period.
4. Task Time – it measures the efficiency of users completing tasks on your website. If the time is too long, it’s a good idea to look for usability issues.
5. Customer Retention Rate – it is a valuable retention metric. It allows you to see how many users decided to stay with your company or product after their initial contact. You calculate it by deducting the number of customers acquired in a given period from the total number of customers at the end of the period. Then you divide that by the number of customers at the beginning of that period.
6. HTTP Requests / Load Times – a slowly loading site can be a big problem for many companies, often leaving a negative impression. For this reason, this metric is a good one to measure. You can do this by looking at the number of HTTP requests and their response time.
7. Task Success Rate – it’s a percentage value showing how often users complete tasks on your website. It’s considered one of the fundamental usability metrics. Still, it’s usually a good idea to get additional context for this data via user interviews and other feedback forms so you can understand why users fail instead of just observing their actions.
8. NPS (Net Promoter Score) – yet another user retention metric, but this time a qualitative one. It measures your customers’ willingness to recommend your product to their friends. It’s a good indicator of their satisfaction and loyalty to your brand. A number on a scale represents it from 0 to 10.
9. Average Order Value – it shows how much people are willing to spend on your products per purchase. It can also be a good indicator of solid user experience, as the value usually rises along with it. Calculating it is easy – divide your total revenue by the number of purchases.
10. Conversion Rate – an essential user engagement metric. It measures how many people decide to perform necessary actions on your website, such as signing up, buying something, etc. It’s essentially the percentage of website users who become your clients.
11. User Error Rate – measures the number of user errors, i.e., people who made a mistake while navigating your website. Bad results may suggest a problem with navigation structure or a different issue – you can often verify this and get additional context via a tree test.
12. Single Ease Question –it’s a simple survey that allows users to rate the difficulty of a task by assigning a score of 1-7. It’s a measure of task completion – not as comprehensive as Task Success Rate – but it may be enough to identify usability issues.
13. Feature Adoption Rate – a percentage value that shows how many new users use a given feature on your website. A good metric to measure after you add elements to your product or service, enhance your offer, or redesign your site.
14. Time on Page – it gives you an understanding of how users use your website and whether they find it interesting. You can calculate the time spent on each page, but you can also measure the length of entire sessions to evaluate the website. Remember that while an extended session time may be good, it may also suggest a negative user experience since people have problems finding what they need.
15. Pageviews – the metric that shows how many users have visited a specific page in your domain. It helps you understand what draws users and may be helpful for some businesses. However, additional context is essential here, as people visiting your site doesn’t necessarily mean they find what they were looking for.

Now that you know the essential UX metrics you should consider, let’s examine the UX testing that is closely related to these metrics.

What is UX testing?

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UX testing plays a vital role in product development. It’s a kind of research that helps businesses evaluate how customers perceive their products and services. Usability testing allows you to identify problems and issues that may affect the user experience negatively.

You can acquire valuable data about the product and the users – for example, time spent on carrying out a specific task, the percentage of people who reach various parts of the website, information about demographics, etc. You can also gather feedback directly from the testers.

You can use all this to improve your solution or design and implement entirely new features.

Why is UX testing important?

The market isn’t set in stone, and the same is true of the Internet. Different user groups have different needs, which can also change on a whim whenever a significant new trend rises.

For this reason, businesses need up-to-date information about user habits. They also need to know if people encounter obstacles when using their services or products. User research is the best way to get this data. It provides you with crucial information you can use to shape your website and your company’s offer.

When should you run a UX test?

You can run UX tests at different stages during project development and after you release the product on the market.

5 tips to improve UX metrics with UX testing

UX testing can help you improve your UX metrics in several ways:

• Interviews and surveys allow you to get the feedback necessary to improve engagement metrics
• Card sorting and tree testing provide you with data that will be useful for boosting usability and conversion metrics
• Consumer research can help you identify problems with specific age, gender, or income groups
• Video-based tests allow you to see how users interact with your product, so you can understand what goes wrong and remove obstacles through small, iterative changes
• You can use many different types of UX testing methods to validate patterns that you’ve noticed because you started tracking the metrics

You can achieve all these things and more using a user research platform such as PlaybookUX.

10 ways how PlaybookUX helps you improve UX metrics

Our PlaybookUX is a comprehensive, video-based user research platform that helps you boost your metrics. It offers easy access to various usability tests, while you can also use it as a research repository.

You can use these research methods to gather data and analyze it with the help of our platform. It allows you to quickly identify problems and find ways to improve your solution, resulting in improved UX metrics.

Here’s how PlaybookUX can help you improve your UX metrics:

1. You can do all kinds of usability tests – moderated interviews, unmoderated tests, card sorts, tree tests, prototyping – through one platform
2. You can boost your website’s information architecture with the help of tree testing, as well as different types of card sorting studies – open, closed, hybrid, image
3. Many elements of studies – such as questions, forms, etc. – can be customized from the ground up, offering a lot of freedom when it comes to designing tests
4. Watching session recordings can offer additional context you can’t get with data only
5. You don’t have to look for test participants on your own – you can recruit them through our platform, which helps save time
6. Automation of various activities – such as scheduling and transcribing – makes user testing more accessible and faster
7. PlaybookUX helps you organize your data and find patterns through an advanced tagging system
8. You have access to aggregated demographic charts of participants
9. You can build comprehensive reports which will serve as a reference point for future analysis of UX metrics
10. You can easily find what you need thanks to our powerful search feature

As you can see, PlaybookUX is a powerful software that can have a positive impact on your UX metrics.

UX metrics: Wrapping up

The importance of UX experience isn’t a point of view anymore – everyone knows you need to take care of it if you want your business to be successful. It also means that you have to measure KPIs and UX metrics to monitor progress and ensure you’re on the right track – otherwise, you’d be doing everything blindly.

Regular and in-depth user research is an excellent way to keep your metrics in check and constantly improve them. The data it provides is essential when adjusting your UX strategy and making changes to improve your business.

One thing that can help immensely in this regard is a user research platform such as our PlaybookUX. Thanks to automation, PlaybookUX will reduce the number of things you need to do, keep your data organized, and allow you to easily and quickly find the information you need.

Check it out if you haven’t already – you can sign up for a 7-day free trial right now.

UX metrics: FAQ

Here are some of the most popular questions people ask about UX metrics.

How is UX performance measured?

You measure UX performance by gathering quantitative data about user behavior and getting feedback directly from the users. In both cases, it’s a good idea to pay attention to specific metrics we described above– thanks to this, you can ensure you won’t miss anything important.

What are user metrics?

UX metrics allow you to evaluate the user experience offered by your product using quantitative and qualitative data. Other terms used to describe these metrics are PX metrics and usability metrics.

What is benchmarking UX?

UX benchmarking evaluates a product’s user experience using UX metrics – usually against the solution’s competition.

What is NPS in UX metrics?

NPS is an abbreviation for Net Promoter Score. It’s a loyalty metric that shows you the likelihood someone will recommend the product, service, or company to their friends. The score is presented on a scale of 0-10.

What is an example of a UX metric?

Task Success Rate is an example of a UX metric that illustrates how the level to which users successfully perform tasks on the website in a given period. The Task Success Rate is shown as a percentage value, where 0% is a failure to complete the task, and 100% means full completion.