What is the connection between user experience and measuring a clear business outcome (KPI)? In this post, we will present ways to measure your website’s user experience to improve your success metrics and achieve more results, and we will explain what a KPI is.
What is a KPI?
Key Performance Indicators, also known as KPIs, are quantifiable metrics that help organizations define and track progress toward achieving the company’s business goals. User experience metrics are different from sales, marketing, or financial metrics for the very simple reason that they track human behavior. UX KPIs provide excellent insights into the severity of usability issues existing on your site or app.
The meaning of KPI versus performance metrics
Although KPIs and performance metrics are quite related to each other, they are not the same. Here is a quick explanation of the differences between the two:
- KPIs are the key goals you need to track to best influence your strategic business results. KPIs support your strategy and help your team focus on what is important to emphasize. An example of a KPI worth paying attention to – new customers per month.
- Performance metrics measure the success of daily business activities that support your KPIs. Although these metrics affect your results, they are not the most critical metrics. Good examples of performance metrics – monthly website visits, newsletter sign-ups, downloading a specific file, etc.
Why are KPIs important?
Investing in tracking KPIs and implementing recommendations to improve these metrics is a great way to ensure that the work being done meets the marketing goals and the general goals of the company or business. Here are some of the best reasons for the need to track KPIs:
- Keeps your team aligned – Whether you are measuring success in a specific project or the performance of the employees themselves, KPIs help your teams work together and essentially move in the same direction – toward achieving your goals.
- Provides a sanity check for the work – KPIs give you a realistic look at how you are operating as a business and company, helping you draw conclusions regarding the company’s operations.
- Making adjustments – KPIs help you clearly see your successes and failures, so you can do more of what worked well for you and reduce activity or stop completely where performance was poor.
- Distributes responsibility on the organizational side of the company – KPIs help ensure that every member of your team knows what performance they need to deliver, and tracking metrics helps you monitor employee progress and helps employees understand whether they are on the right track or not.
What is user experience?
User experience (UX) is how a person feels when interfacing with a particular system/interface: a website, an app, desktop software, and essentially any form of interaction between a human and a digital device. At the end of the day, the success of a user experience is measured by the speed as well as the number of successful actions users performed on our site/app. The shorter the action time and the more actions completed successfully, the more successful the user experience in the interface is.
What is the difference between KPI and ROI?
ROI is a financial concept, as opposed to KPI which refers to business success through user experience. ROI measures the Return on Investment – meaning for every shekel I put into a marketing channel, how much did it actually return to me as a result of sales.
KPI metrics and KPI examples
First metric – Task Success Rate
The percentage of tasks completed correctly by users in the interface. For instance, we would want to measure the ratio of our users who filled out the registration form on the site successfully, or what is the ratio among users whom we assigned a task of buying product X, how many users actually understood how to buy and completed the purchase successfully.
This does not tell why users dropped off, it only says that a certain proportion of them dropped off – now begins the work of understanding why they dropped off and what they lacked to complete the task as we imagined they would perform it.
Second metric – Time on Task
This metric represents the amount of time it took a user to complete the task; it can be expressed in seconds or minutes. You can measure the average and understand how long it took our users, for example, to register on the site, how long it took our users to buy a product – if the time is too long, then something in the process needs to be improved as soon as possible.
The shorter the time spent by the user per task, the better the user experience in our interface!
Third metric – User satisfaction with our interface
This metric cannot be calculated by analyzing data such as from Google Analytics for example; it must be based on a user survey. We need to prepare a specific set of questions that surveys how users use the site. We need to conduct what is called Usability testing – a survey/questionnaire that details the things we want to know about our interface and how good it is.
For example: What works for you in the contact form and what doesn’t? Do you understand what you need to fill in each and every field on the form?
Fourth metric – Navigation vs. Search usage percentage
We would want to know, for example on an e-commerce site, how a potential user found and purchased a specific product: Did they go to a main category, then to a subcategory, then to the product page, and then purchased? Did they search directly for the product name and then purchase? We want to understand how clear our information architecture is and what our users work better with – through navigation and menus or through simple or advanced search?
If we embark on a move to measure and improve UX, user experience, we are going to help the human beings using our site, our interface, as they interact with the technology we implemented. Thereby – our users will be able to derive more value and be able to complete specific actions in less time – such as completing a checkout on the site, signing up for our app, and so on.
So what needs to be done to improve user experience on the website to achieve more results?
✔️Understand exactly where the problem stems from – Install measurement tools like Hotjar or Google Analytics and perform a weekly or monthly analysis. Calculate the metrics mentioned above and understand exactly where the users’ difficulty stems from; understanding the problem already brings you closer to finding the solution.
✔️After we found the problem – Get into the mind of the user – or users, assuming the problem repeats across a large number of users – why did they do what they did, what element did we place on the site that caused them to perform the task the way they did? What was the user flow they went through? Why did they go through it that way? After deciphering this – we can change the user flow or update a particular feature to align ourselves with the users’ mindset.
✔️Before the changes go “live” – production – test them very thoroughly in the staging environment and give this environment to real users so they can provide feedback on whether the changes allow them to perform tasks in less time and with greater ease.
✔️Even after the long-awaited changes went “live” – continue to perform tests and constantly improve the experience across the various tasks we measure.
In conclusion
It is very important to remember that user experience is not measured as a one-and-done deal; it is a process that must be repeated at least once a quarter. If there is an opportunity to measure metrics and draw conclusions about the user experience on our site once a month, all the better. The more you keep your finger on the pulse of your interface and understand what is happening with your users – the more you can improve your business results from the interface – whether it is an app or a website.
Good luck!
About the author
Ido Yaakov, CEO of Omnis Digital Agency, which provides end-to-end digital services, from building strategy to branding businesses and ventures, UX/UI design, website and app development, and digital marketing services.
