The Most Important UX Design KPIs and How to Measure Them

Great user experience determines how easy and pleasant it is for customers to interact with your product and reach their goals with its help. The better your UX, the more satisfied the users. And the more satisfied your users, the higher the conversion (and therefore revenue). 

But only your target audience can tell you if they like using your product or you’d better improve some aspect of it. So, how can you know if you are doing everything right when designing new or applying changes to existing user experience? UX design key performance indicators (KPIs) can help here.

KPIs of a UX design help you keep track of your customer experience and identify areas for improvement. When you measure customer satisfaction, NPS, or collect statistics on user feedback, it’s easier to compare your brand to the competitors’ and strive for the standards that the industry sets.

In this article, we are going to discuss how to understand whether your product offers your clients a good user experience by providing you with the best UX Design KPI examples and telling you how to calculate them. 

Let’s get it started! 

Effective metrics to measure your UX

Here is the list of the most important metrics to evaluate your UX design.

Navigation vs search

Leverage your analytics to see how your customers navigate your site. Try to see if they are using navigation links or internal searches. If on any web page the ratio “navigation vs. search “is biased towards navigation it means that such a page is perceived by the visitor as friendly.

To define the “Navigation vs Search “ metric you should divide the number of completed tasks via Navigation or Search by the total number of completed tasks.

Time per task

Image credit: justinmind.com

Time per task KPI shows how long it takes for a user to complete a certain task on your website/product. Usually, the faster the user can cope with the job, the better the UX. 

To calculate this metric add the result of each user together and divide it by the total number of respondents.

Task success rate and error rate

Image credit: everyinteraction.com

Task success and error rates are a great way to measure and monitor user performance on your website or product. These indicators can give you an idea of ​​your weaknesses/strengths and what the reason is.

Measuring success rates allows you to determine the percentage of tasks that a user completes correctly, but the error rate shows the opposite. You can also get more granular and start measuring partial success versus error rate.

Customer Satisfaction (CSAT)

Image credit: quiq.com

CSAT is the average satisfaction score that users derive based on their experience.

By analyzing customer satisfaction, you will receive insights to optimize and improve your product or service. And this will allow you to change the offer to suit the users’ needs.

To measure it companies use a survey in which they ask the user how they would rate their level of satisfaction with the product. The best way is to use a scale from “Very unsatisfied” to “Very satisfied”. But some companies choose to make this metric branded and more personalized by replacing emoticons with their own icons.

System Usability Scale (SUS)

Image credit: uiuxtrend.com

SUS is a questionnaire designed to assess the overall usability of your product. It consists of 10 questions revealing how convenient it is for the user to use the site/application. Often, due to the complexity of the survey for respondents, it is only conducted during usability tests.

To begin with, give respondents 10 statements, each of which they rate on a scale from 1 (strongly disagree) to 5 (strongly agree). Odd statements are positive, even statements are negative.

To calculate the final grade, you need to add all 10 grades, multiply the sum by 2 (a value between 0 and 100 is obtained), and calculate the arithmetic mean among all SUS-indicators of the respondents.

The average SUS score is 68, not 50 as it might seem.

Net Promoter Score (NPS)

Image credit:reviewpro.com

NPS is a metric that shows how much users love (hate) you. To find out about the attitude of customers towards the company you should ask just one question: “How likely you are to recommend the company/product /brand to your friends/colleagues?” After collecting and analyzing the answers, you can carry out a calculation, which consists of the following steps:

1. Consumers have rated on a ten-point scale the likelihood that they will recommend a company/product to their friends/colleagues;

2. Based on the results of all assessments, they are divided into three groups: Those who put nine and ten points – “promoters”, seven and eight points – “passives”, six points and below – “detractors”.

3. The NPS index is calculated as the percentage difference between “promoters” and “detractors”.

What UX KPIs can’t do

UX metrics are useful, but they have some restrictions.

1. They don’t protect you from making errors. 

Mistakes do happen. After measuring your UX metrics, don’t assume you’ve got a perfectly accurate answer. Instead, try to understand how accurate the measurements are by using statistical intervals.

2. They don’t predict the future accurately

UX metrics are just UX metrics. This is not a crystal ball that will show how the audience will perceive the product. Research helps to imagine if a product will be usable for people, but they cannot guarantee the result 100%.

3. They don’t give you further instructions

Some people think that KPIs will dictate what to do next. This is not true.

Metrics don’t tell you what to do or change in the interface. But by doing research, you can find out which interface element caused confusion and errors and this way assumes what kind of changes can eliminate the problem.

To sum up, by measuring the indicators we’ve discussed earlier in this article and then making improvements based on the data you received you can track whether the number of user errors decreases when the design changes, or if the user is able to complete the task in less time, or in general whether your customer’s attitude towards the product has become better.