User Review
( votes)So you have a website now. Good. But how do you find out if your users are having the best experience when they visit it?
As Peter Drucker, the father of management thinking, said: “what gets measured, gets managed.” Measuring things is a major aspect of any business. Without measuring things, we wouldn’t know what works and what doesn’t. This rings true even for user experience, even though the measurements are qualitative.
But how do you know if your users are having a satisfactory experience? This is where the concept of UX KPIs come in. By measuring these KPIs, you can get some valuable insight into what to improve. And with 55% of companies not carrying out UX testing, you can stay ahead of the curve by measuring KPIs.
But before we talk about what KPIs to look out for, let us briefly discuss what a KPI is.
What is a KPI?
KPI stands for a key performance indicator. Basically, they are quantifiable measurements that let a business know whether they are getting closer to achieving their goals. UX KPI just means user experience key performance indicators.
When building a business website, you’d want everyone that visits it to have the best experience possible.
That is why measuring user experience has become an unavoidable thing to do.
5 UX KPIs to Track
There are many UX KPIs you can keep track of as a business owner with a website. It would be hard to list them all without bloating up the length of this article. However, these five are the most important ones.
1. Task Success Rate
One of the biggest UX KPIs that you need to keep track of is the task success rate or task completion rate. By measuring this UX KPI, it will give you a percentage that tells you how users behave when it comes to completing tasks.
Tasks can be varied, depending on the nature of your business. It could be anything from purchasing a product to downloading an eBook. As long as the tasks are clearly defined, along with what counts as success, you can gain valuable insight.
The task success rate is calculated using the following formula:
Task success rate = Number of correctly completed tasks/total number of attempts
2. Time on Task
How long does it take for a user to complete a task on your website? This KPI is usually expressed in seconds and minutes and is also known as task completion time. Basically, it is believed that the more time people spend doing a task on your website, the more it diminishes the user experience.
To get a more robust picture, it is advisable to look at the average time users spend on each task.
If you see that one particular task is taking too long to complete, it means something needs to be done. So this makes this UX KPI an excellent way of detecting problems on the website. By decreasing the amount of time it takes to complete a task, you can effectively increase customer satisfaction.
3. User Error Rate
The number of mistakes users make is what is known as the user error rate. For example, this could be the number of unsuccessful attempts it takes for someone to input their credit card number when making a purchase.
The more mistakes users make on your website, the less user-friendly it is. A high user error rate could imply that there is a high number of usability problems and that is something that you need to look into.
There are two ways in which the user error is usually calculated:
1. Error Occurrence Rate
This is a metric you use in the following two scenarios:
- There is only potential failure associated with the task
- There are a number of potential failures associated with the task, but you only want to focus on one
It is calculated using the following formula:
Error Occurrence Rate = Total number of errors that occurred for all users/total number of possible errors for user
2. Error Rate
This metric is used when a single task has multiple potential errors, and you want to know the number of errors each user makes on average.
It is calculated using the following formula:
Error Rate = Number of errors/total number of attempts
4. Search vs. Navigation
Usually, when a user logs into your website, the first thing they will use to get where they want is the navigation. If that fails, they will attempt to use the search bar. Now if it turns out the users are using the search function more than the navigation, it means the site is too hard to navigate.
In the ideal scenario, the user would use the search bar less as they could find everything they need in the navigation bar. If the search rate is high, take a look at your home page – maybe it’s overcrowded and difficult to use?
For example, if you have an eCommerce website, you can track how many used the navigation to find a product. You can also track how many used the search bar to do the same. Afterwards, you compare the two numbers to see what’s what.
The below formula is what will be used in this scenario:
Search vs. navigation = Number of tasks completed through navigation or search / Total number of completed tasks
5. System Usability Scale (SUS)
When it comes to measuring the usability of any product, the SUS is one of the great KPI examples. This is because this performance indicator is very easy to use. In fact, its inventor, John Brooke, described it as a “quick and dirty” tool.
The scale has 10 questions, all of them with five possible answers: strongly disagree, disagree, neutral, agree, and strongly agree. Since it requires user participation, it is an excellent way to gorge user perception of your website.
Tracking UX KPIs Will Make You Understand Your Audience
When you have a business website, the last thing you would want is for the user to have a terrible experience when they use it. Having a well-designed website with the best website speed, while absolutely vital, is simply not enough. Bad user experience is not only detrimental to an SEO campaign, but it can also actually force your customers to look for something better. In fact, poor customer experience can make you lose 89% of your customers to your competition.
By measuring your UX KPIs, you can channel your efforts into not only meeting the expectations of your users but exceeding them. This means they won’t leave your website and go to a competitor’s.
So make sure you are tracking indicators like task success rate, user error, and navigation functionality to make sure users always leave satisfied.
