Key Website UX Metrics That Makes You Stand Out in The Crowd

Developing a website is one thing and maintaining it for the best possible user experience (UX) is another key factor. In today’s competitive business world your UX can act as your competitive advantage, helping you stand out from the crowd. Great user experiences result in your customer satisfaction, and thus, can boost your bottom line.

Why Should you Track UX Metrics?

UX starts with the initial interaction of a user with a website and ends when the user stops using it. So, you should always keep track of your website users’ experience and improve it.

Thanks to the great UX metrics and marketing KPIs availability, you can easily monitor user engagement and other success factors.

When considering the big picture, the goal is to choose the right metrics to track and optimize. So that you can boost user experience and make a positive impact on their mind with your website.

Though, it’s vital to understand how you can quantify that impact. What user experience measures can you use to assess the improvement? What can you do to convince the managers and investors that it’s worthwhile? Let’s discuss the answers to these questions regarding UX metrics.

How to Choose the Right UX Metrics for your Product

UX performance metrics enable you to measure the ROI resulted from the UX modifications. Without these metrics calculating the tangible impact of UX changes is impossible.

When it comes to evaluating your UX’s success, failure, or ineffectiveness, metrics have always been a challenging discussion.

Google Analytics can show you what’s going on, but it can’t determine the underlying reasons. You’re doing guesswork if you only rely on web analytics. Sure, it might be a well-informed assumption. But you can’t be sure why things are the way they are on your GA. So, you need to observe actual users using your website. And that’s where tools such as Heatmaps and Session Replays can provide beneficial insights.

Getting back to the question of how to choose the right UX metrics, you can use the following guidelines:

1- The HEART Framework

UX metrics can have five types of impacts on user’s experience, based on Google’s HEART framework for user-centric design. You don’t have to measure metrics in all of these five areas. Instead, you should focus on the ones that are most essential for your project.

The HEART framework can assist you in deciding whether or not to include or remove a category. For example, in a corporate setting, when users are expected to use the product every day as part of their job, engagement may be meaningless.

In such a situation, you may decide to prioritize the happiness of users or their task completion. However, considering engagement with certain product features as an indicator of their usability may still be beneficial.

Here are the five components of the HEART framework:

• Happiness

Users’ happiness in using a product is typically measured through surveys. Satisfaction, perceived ease of use, and Net Promoter Score (NPS) are examples of metrics that evaluate user attitudes.

• Engagement

The degree to which a user is involved, as assessed by behavioral indicators such as frequency, intensity, or engagement.

• Adoption

People who start using a product or service. For example, Gmail users using labels, active users of a product, and the number of new accounts in a period.

• Retention

The number of existing users that return for another purchase. For instance, repeat purchase ratio and the active users from one period that are still active in a subsequent period. On the other hand, customer churn refers to the failure to retain users.

• Task Success

The ratio of tasks completed successfully. It is important for task-oriented areas. For example, the task success rate of search, the user error rate in navigating to a specific page.

2- Project Goals

Surely, the HEART framework is great for a customer-centric UX design. Though, the most beneficial UX metrics are those unique to your SaaS product.

For this purpose, you can use the process of Goals, Signals, and Metrics:

• Goals

To stand out from your competitors you need a goal-oriented UX design, and so are the metrics you use. All of your team members should be on the same page regarding your goals. Also, they should know which UX metrics help measure where you are towards those goals.

• Signals

To signal what are the most important UX metrics you should consider your goals. You can define which elements of user behavior demonstrate the success or failure of your company in reaching goals.

• Metrics

After identifying signals, it’s time to choose metrics that are important to you when you want to conduct an A/B or multivariate testing.

The process of refining goals to signals and signals to metrics should prioritize the right metrics. So, track the UX metrics related to your key goals first, then move forward to the next less critical goals. Only keep metrics that you will rely on when making a decision.

You can use the following template to include the HEART framework, considering Goals, Signals, and Metrics, to decide on metrics:

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What Are the Most Important UX Performance Metrics?

Now that you know all about choosing the right metrics, you can decide on what’s best for your product. Having that in mind, take a look at the following UX metrics practical for most of the UX design teams:

• 5 Metrics to Measure User Behavior

1- Conversions

This metric is useful when a specific thing is triggered by a UX modification. For instance, completing a web form, signing up for a newsletter, or completing another action. Conversion rate (CR) can precisely quantify how many people convert in that exact activity. As a result, you fairly make sure your design improvements had an impact.

2- Abandonment Rate

Simply put, how many customers have visited your online retail business, added a few items to their cart, and then departed without checking out? The abandonment rate is calculated as the ratio of abandoned shopping carts to completed transactions.

3- Average Order Value (AOV)

This metric is your total revenue divided by the number of checkouts. AOV is a clear indicator of your company’s profit. If your UX efforts are directly linked to increased cross-selling or upselling, AOV can show its effectiveness.

4- Pageviews

It is one of the top website metrics that UX designers use. Pageviews reveal how many people have visited your website pages. If you use a user analytics platform like ours, many user data like page views and clicks are gathered automatically. So, this platform reduces analysis and reporting time substantially.

5- Task Success Rate

To calculate the task success rate, you assign a series of realistic tasks to a group of users. The definition of task accomplishment is clear. For example, reaching a certain page in a check-out process or completing a step in a mobile app. It’s crucial to have a clear definition of success and/or failure.

If 7 users out of a group of 10 complete the defined task, the task success rate is 70%. The more users you analyze in your group, the lower error you have in your measurement.

• 4 Metrics to Measure User Attitude

1- Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT)

This metric evaluates customer happiness, but unlike NPS, it doesn’t have specific question limits. This allows you to ask anything from a single question to a complete survey. The percentages represent the results.

The good thing about CSAT is that you can customize it easily. The negative point is that people usually don’t spend much time filling out a lengthy survey. So, your results only include those who hate or love you very much.

2- Net Promoter Score (NPS)

A survey called the Net Promoter Score (NPS) might be included at the end of your UX testing. NPS is a method of calculating loyalty based on a single question. It evaluates if you are happy enough with a service, product, or experience to refer it to a friend.

3- System Usability Scale (SUS)

The advantages of this metric are that it‘s easy to use and good for even a small sample size. It also clearly shows whether or not a feature is improved.

4- Standardized User Experience Percentile Rank Questionnaire (SUPR-Q)

This is an eight-item questionnaire for evaluating the success of a website’s user experience. It’s employed by over a hundred companies across a variety of sectors. You can find further details on this metric here.

Conclusion

In this article, we discussed the reason behind using UX metrics and the way you can choose the right ones. Then, we introduced 9 key metrics that most businesses use to evaluate their UX efforts. Surely, these are not all the metrics available. So, you should see what’s best for your business and product or service.