The current number of mobile phone users is 7.26 billion, (including both smart and feature phones) which means 91.08% of people around the world are cell phone owners.
Spending upwards of 11 hours a day on screens, the main experiences that businesses deliver to customers are digital. Businesses that deliver engaging digital experiences are able to captivate their customers so that they end up using their products over and over again.
Organizations are finding it difficult to measure their UX Design performance metrics to understand the success and progress of their efforts despite the large amounts of data that is collected daily.
According to Forbes magazine, Americans use 4,416,720 GB of internet data including 188,000,000 emails, 18,100,000 texts and 4,497,420 Google searches every single minute.
Data can’t tell us everything and UX Designers should always look into qualitative and quantitative measures to gather important data to validate usability to enhance the user’s experience.
What is User Experience (UX)
UX stands for “user experience” and includes everything the customer experiences while trying to accomplish a task in software or a digital product. Don Norman coined the term “user experience” in the 1990s, claiming that it “encompasses all aspects of the end-users interaction with the company, its services, and its products.”
Shuang Liu, User Experience Designer Nanodegree program instructor, offers a great explanation of the value of the skill “UX Design is understanding user needs and designing solutions with those needs in mind. We create products to solve the problems of users. UX design is the process that reminds us of the needs of our users. Ultimately, products are used by humans and should bring value to humans.”
Why Measure Success in UX Design?
User experience is about the various interactions people have, how they feel about an experience, and what actions they expect to take while using your product or interface. There are many classic testing metrics dealing with design, loyalty and branding, and terminology. The objective is to know what you are measuring and why.
- Engagement levels are monitored by how long users spend on a task by their actions.
- Customer satisfaction can be quantified through polls or surveys.
- Conversion rates tracked by how many users complete the task on an app or website.
UX designers rely on feedback, user ratings, metrics, and usability testing to get the results they wish to see. Here are 5 additional ways to measure success in your organization’s UX design performance.
Benchmarking – We all know a benchmark as a reference point against metrics can be assessed or compared to. In UX benchmarking involves evaluating efforts over time to see how they are performing.
Websites, products, software, and mobile apps are common things that are benchmarked from user feedback. Usually they are done on regular intervals (quarterly or yearly) or after a feature or design enhancement through usability testing.
Stakeholder Feedback – Great ideas and products come together when everyone collaborates and embraces the task. Having all stakeholders on the same page is important for the success of the project.
Politics, roadblocks, and stubbornness amongst the stakeholders can derail your progress. By defining roles and responsibilities early on you can get a better handle on any issues that may arise.
Task Success Rate – If your users can’t complete the tasks successfully then there will be abandonment and frustration which can lead to bad reviews and poor performance for the project.
Conducting user testing very early in the development cycle can help boost this rate.Task success rate is calculated based on the average of all users (in a time period) for all tasks.
Navigation – Navigation is simply getting from page to page and making it confusing will not increase your metrics. Keeping things simple is the best way to keep your users on your pages longer.
Having clear hierarchical structure can help with organization as well as a sitemap or search bar. A clear navigation system will help keep users stay engaged and you will have increased conversion rates vs. bounce rates.
Net Promoter Score – The net promoter score (NPS) is a metric that quantifies how many more people are likely to strongly recommend your site or product compared to those likely to criticize it. This score is closely related to the perception of user experience.
The net promoter score is computed by asking people to provide an answer, on a scale from 0–5, to the question: “How likely are you to recommend this website, product, or service to a friend or relative?”
The higher the score the more demonstrated increased customer loyalty and future profits can be and whether a redesign was worth as a return on investment.
Ready To Learn More About UX Design?
Setting up usability metrics for your product or service is an easy task. But selecting the right tools to gauge the success of these metrics can be challenging. Forrester Research estimates that well-designed user experience can increase conversions by 400%.
With Udacity’s hands-on project-centric learning, there’s no better way to meet the demand than by registering for the User Experience UX Designer Nanodegree program.
Udacity’s UX Designer Nanodegree program teaches students how to design impactful user experiences for products in today’s digital world. You’ll have the opportunity to build a portfolio that showcases your ability to transform user research to high-fidelity interactive designs.
