When it comes to introducing ways to measure user experience of your business or if you’re trying to raise the maturity of your UX practice, it’s good to have a UX measurement plan.
You may have arrived at this article after reading about ‘Measuring UX Metrics, KPIs and Performances’. If you haven’t, we recommend that you give this article a read to find out why we measure UX and the most common UX metrics.
Before we implement any UX measurement plan, make sure you know who your users are. This is vital because even having a perfect UX measurement plan will be inconclusive and unreliable with the wrong set of users.
Now, let’s get into the details on how to create a UX measurement plan.
How to Create a UX Measurement Plan
1. Understand Your Company’s KPIs
Knowing how your company measures success is a great starting point, every company has Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) – these are metrics that companies use to define success.
Revenue is the ultimate metric that companies track but it is a lagging indicator only telling you what has already happened, it’s easy to measure but hard to improve.
Make sure your company tracks other metrics that provide additional information to give context to the revenue, this can be behavioural metrics such as repeat purchases, and attitudinal metrics such as customer satisfaction and likelihood of recommending to friends and family, etc.
If your company has multiple product lines, do differentiate by having brand and product metrics.
2. Benchmark UX Quality
Once the KPIs are identified, we move onto the next step of establishing benchmarks that measure the perception when it comes to the quality of your UX.
For websites, we recommend using SUPR-Q, which stands for Standardized User-experience Percentile Rank Questionnaire. This is an eight-item questionnaire designed to measure the quality of the website user experience, looking specifically at usability, credibility, loyalty and appearance.
Chances are, like many companies, your company has annual customer surveys where you collect more traditional metrics such as Net Promoter Score (NPS) and customer satisfaction. Take advantage of these annual customer surveys and leverage on them by including standardised measures of UX quality in the same survey.
Of course, measuring user experience behaviour doesn’t equate to measuring perceptions of user experience, it is half the battle but it is a great and easy way to start.
When it comes to some KPIs such as purchases, cancellations or other behaviours, it’s a good practice to link these behavioural data to attitudinal data of the perception of the UX quality of the same customer. Having this linkage will help your company understand how the changes in UX attitudes affect your company’s KPIs.
3. Track Top-Tasks to Benchmark Their UX Regularly
Customers use your products for various reasons, by identifying and understanding these reasons, you can improve on them.
For each product or app you have, conduct a top-task analysis. Doing so will help you and your company understand which tasks and functions are essential to your customers.
Do separate the long tail of trivial tasks from the handful of tasks that drive customers to return and recommend to others. In order to do so, you can conduct a top-tasks survey by listing down all the tasks and have representative users pick their top 3-5 tasks.
If it is challenging to conduct a separate survey just for this purpose, you can also consider adding a top-tasks question in the customer’s survey in collecting KPIs and measures of UX quality. This question should only take an additional 2-3 minutes for users to answer.
After finalising the top-tasks, it’s now time to benchmark the user experience of all the products and product functions that concerns the users’ selected top-tasks.
Benchmarking the user experience will aid in having a future comparison point in order to optimise the right tasks, metrics and experiences.
If you have various products and teams, do take care to benchmark each product according to each products’ top tasks. This will provide additional comparison points and more data to look into, bear in mind that not all the products from the same company results in the same user experience. Take, for example, Skype vs Teams from Microsoft.
4. Create An Improvement Plan
Now that we have a good idea of where things are in the user experience, it’s time to make a plan to improve it. Documenting the user experience is just a prequel to making actual improvements.
Here is when traditional UX methods come in, from card sorting to understanding how users perceive labels and phrases to contextual inquiries in understanding problems and goals that customers face. It can include tree-testing to see how people browse for products and usability testing to find out what challenges users face when trying to complete their tasks.
Do make use of multiple methods to cover all your bases, iterate early and often and ensure that each phase is measured with a core set of metrics.
5. Recognise How Changes Improved the KPIs
After implementing the changes, there should be a visible impact on the more high-level perceptions of UX quality. Compare KPIs over time to observe the impact and take any necessary course corrections. For example, the abandonment rate of a certain checkout page on an ecommerce website over time.
6. Calculate the ROI
Now that changes have been made and it’s evident how the changes have improved the user experience and company KPIs, we can utilise the linkage to calculate the return on investment (ROI).
Showing how changes in design have made a beneficial impact will help to make a compelling case for UX, and you may even walk out with a bigger UX budget.
7. Conduct Periodic UX Audits
Think of this as frequent doctors check-ups to keep things in tip-top shape, making sure that everything is in good order.
By incorporating periodic checkpoints, you can ensure that the right people and processes are in place to maintain the right methods and metrics being collected.
Customer needs and markets will change over time and it’s important to make sure that you’re aligned properly to the company and customers to continue creating and keeping customers.
