Improving the user experience means starting with the right measure or measures to manage.
Here are 10 of the more common ones I’ve written about:
- SUPR-Q: The Standardized Universal Percentile Rank-Questionnaire is a 13 item instrument for measuring website usability, credibility/trust, loyalty and appearance. Scores are based on a database of 200 websites from tens of thousands of users across dozens of industries.
- Net Promoter Score Benchmarks: How likely people are spreading a positive message about your software is a good indicator of future growth. It’s even better to know how your product’s NPS compares with the industry.
- 10 Essential Usability Metrics: Know these metrics, use them and improve them to make a better user experience.
- Completion Rates: The fundamental usability metric. If a user can’t complete the task not much else matters.
- Disasters: The only thing worse than task failure would be when a user fails a task but she thinks she completed it successfully. This is a disaster and across 174 tasks I’ve seen up to 30% of user task-attempts end in a disaster. Don’t let this be your task.
- Task Times: OK, actually the worse thing would be a user taking a long time to think he completed a task he actually failed. Task times are the quintessential efficiency measure (and usually better than clicks). Time is money, and users are money. Waste the former and lose the latter.
- Usability Problems: Low task completion rates, high task times and abundant disasters are usually caused by problems in the user interface. Find them, fix them and prevent them.
- First Clicks: If a user clicks down the wrong path, less than half eventually complete the task successfully. If the first click is down the right path, 87% succeed.
- Usefulness: If it’s not useful then it won’t get used and there will be no user experience to measure. The Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) is a questionnaire for measuring usefulness. Usability itself is actually a good predictor of usefulness in the TAM (when a product is easy to use it suddenly becomes useful: think TiVO).
- System Usability Scale (SUS): The most used questionnaire for measuring the perceived ease of use for software, hardware and mobile devices is the System Usability Scale. This 10 item questionnaire provides a measure of perceived usability that can be a great benchmark, especially when compared to a database of 500 other product tests.
