User experience (UX) is everything today. Poor digital experience can easily and quickly reflect in your client list and thus, your bottom line. It starts from the first user interaction with your website or webapp and ends with… well, it never quite ends. User experience is, in fact, a continuous process that goes on and on until the user decides to stop using your product. That’s probably why the number of potential UX metrics is ever-growing and now there’s a lot that you can track.
For best results, you need to monitor both user experience and business KPIs, from real user to engagement, usability, adoption, as well as retention. Still, while looking at the bigger picture, the key is to select the right metrics to keep tabs on and optimize to improve user interactions and overall satisfaction with your website or webapp. With the help of UX performance indicators, you can quantify and calculate the ROI of the changes you’ve brought to your product in terms of user experience, which is otherwise impossible.
In this post, we are going to explore what are the most commonly used UX metrics and KPIs used to measure user experience.
UX metrics are quantitative data used to monitor, measure, and compare a product’s user experience over time. Unlike other types of metrics such as sales, finance, or marketing, they are difficult to quantify since they reflect human behavior and attitude. Big brands such as Google, Airbnb, or YouTube use UX metrics to measure and improve the user experience of their products to keep their customers happy.
This data is hard to translate into numbers, but there are some useful frameworks that made it possible such as Forrester’s Customer Experience which groups these metrics into three main categories:
Here is an example breakdown of the most important UX metrics and KPIs Product Managers should use for measuring user experience, impacting each category:
Real User Monitoring (RUM for short or end-user experience monitoring) is a technology that allows you to monitor and analyze your customers’ experience throughout your website or application and see exactly how they interact with it. It enables you to see everything from HTTP requests, crashes, timeouts to Apdex scores that speak to your users’ satisfaction with your product or service.
There are many benefits to using a RUM solution as every little deviation from optimal performance across locations or devices can have major consequences to your bottom line. Not only that, but by implementing RUM in your business will help your developers have an early warning system that will tell them when things start to go sideways by setting alerts for things like Apdex metrics, page load times, timeouts, and errors, etc.
You’ll have actionable insights about what’s affecting your users’ experience with your product and have the option to fix the issue before you have a catastrophic failure.
There are several important RUM metrics you need to consider for your webapp in order to ensure optimal performance for all your users:
User Satisfaction Score or Apdex is a measurement of your users’ level of satisfaction based on the response time of request(s) when interacting with your website or application.
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