Building a strong business case is an increasingly essential part of any successful UX (user experience) project. In recent years, there’s been growing recognition of the role UX plays in both user acquisition and retention. If you build something that’s easy to use, more people will want to use it - and importantly keep using it.
In a digital world, where competition is rapidly growing, it is more important than ever for UX teams to demonstrate the business value of research and good design. This can be achieved by creating a plan for measuring and improving user experience which matches UX to an organisation’s key performance indicators (KPIs).
Creating a plan
Every product, website, or design has a user interface. What differentiates a good user experience from a bad one is based on superior measurable outcomes and measuring the user experience starts with understanding who your users are and what tasks they are trying to accomplish.
Despite this many organisations are often in the dark when it comes to defining what their audiences want. Indeed UX pioneer Jeff Sauro, who has played a leading role in advocating the business case for UX, believes many companies are simply not aware of the demographics of their users. Web analytics only goes so far and for the vast majority of users who don't purchase something, it can be unclear why they visited a website and whether they accomplished their goal.
Unless you've actually surveyed users on the live website, it's hard to know if your customer profile matches your browser profile. Usually, a few basic questions (for example, age, gender, occupation, income) quickly narrows the profile picture, helps build the customer segments, and provides important data for personas.
This process of UX research is essential when it comes to devising the plan. The more user research you can carry out during the initial phase, the more UX issues can be identified. This then helps in the creation of tangible goals, such as improving the conversion rate on a particular web page. Remote usability platforms are a great way of carrying out user research across a wide scale. Not only is this type of approach cost-effective, it allows data to be obtained in a timely fashion, and is particularly useful when it comes to aligning the UX research efforts with agile design timeframes.
Next, it’s important to understand how your organisation measures success. While revenue is usually the ultimate metric that the company leadership track, you need to track other metrics that give a clue about how revenue is achieved. These include behavioural metrics—registrations and repeat purchases— as well as attitudinal ones—customer satisfaction, likelihood to repurchase, and likelihood to recommend.
Choosing the right metrics
Metrics are the signals that show whether your UX strategy is working. Using metrics is key to tracking changes over time, benchmarking against iterations of your own site or application or those of competitors, and setting targets.
As outlined by Sauro, UX metrics have a significant role to play when it comes to complementing metrics that companies traditionally track using analytics—such as engagement time or bounce rate—by increasing business focus on the key aspects of a user experience. The three categories of the big-picture UX metrics that correlate with the success of a user experience are usability, engagement, and conversion.
Usability focuses on how easily people can accomplish what they’ve set out to do, and can include metrics such as time on task and task success rate. Engagement is a metric that can be difficult to read, but it can yield better results in combination with qualitative insights which make a real contribution to understanding how much people interact with a site or application, how much attention they give to it, how much time they spend in a flow state, and how good they feel about it.
Conversion is the metric that ultimately company leaders care about most. But its use can mean focusing on a small percentage of users who are ready to commit at the expense of other people who are just becoming aware of your site, or thinking about increasing their engagement with it.
Popular quantitative UX metrics include task success rate, time on task, use of search vs. navigation, user error rate, and System Usability Scale (SUS). The SUS uses a 10 item questionnaire with five response options for respondents, ranging from strongly agree to strongly disagree. It’s a tried and trusted way for turning feedback into measurable data.
Qualitative metrics are more generally focused around reported expectations, performance, and overall satisfaction. They are equally important, especially when it comes to gauging customer responses to existing designs.
Voice of the Customer (VoC) studies are exceptionally useful in obtaining a combination of qualitative and quantitative information. VOC surveys are an efficient and cost effective way of understanding who users are and what they are trying to accomplish on websites or software. With the help of remote usability software tools, VOC surveys can be emailed to prospective or current customers, or set to pop-up on a website. Using just a few questions and a top task analysis, VOCs build the necessary foundation of information for knowing what to fix and what your users are trying to accomplish.
Using both quantitative and qualitative metrics will allow you to measure the complete user experience and create KPIs that can be measured both in numbers and user sentiments.
A framework for best practice
To create the chain of accountability from pixels to profits, you need to understand what a customer does and thinks. The best framework to evaluate and improve the experience for users is based on the Six Sigma DMAIC methodology that's been successfully applied across thousands of organisations and disparate products.
The Six Sigma DMAIC methodology is a five step process based around defining tasks, users, and metrics, and then measuring before and after making changes. Once you’ve improved things, you implement a process (including iterative testing) to keep things working well. It is the most effective way to ensure that the user experience becomes quantifiably better.
1. Define your outcome measures - Your metrics should match your research goals. Findability, completion rates, likelihood to recommend, and purchase rate are all good items to measure.
2. Define the users and what they're trying to accomplish - Use a combination of true-intent and voice of customer (VoC) surveys to understand users
3. Measure the baseline – Collecting baseline helps you identify where you’ve improved the experience. Measure first using the existing product experience with a sample of users attempting the top tasks, and collect the metrics you identified.
4. Implement your changes - Make your new design, feature, branding, or bug fix. Think iteratively here. It's better to fail fast.
5. Measure after your redesign – Ensure that you measure again. It may seem like your changes are guaranteed to make things better, but did they? By how much?
Continuous evaluation is key
When it comes to measuring user experience, there’s a whole range of options to consider. Ensuring you take the right approach is essential for evaluating the merits of a particular design or development, and deciding whether further work is needed to improve usability.
A key element of any UX programme is continuous evaluation, particularly when it comes to reassessing performance against KPIs. You will only see insight and value when you re-test over time. Demonstrating measurable progress also allows UX professionals to begin articulating return on investment (ROI) and is just ultimately good UX.
UserZoom are hosting a seminar exploring the role of UX in business, which will include a keynote address from UX pioneer Jeff Sauro, on June 16th. For more information click here.
By Arthur Moan, Vice President of Customer Success EU, UserZoom
PrivSec Conferences will bring together leading speakers and experts from privacy and security to deliver compelling content via solo presentations, panel discussions, debates, roundtables and workshops.
For more information on upcoming events, visit the website.
comments powered by Disqus