How to Measure Success in UI/UX Design
User interface metrics and user experience metrics are the key indicators of a website or an app’s performance.
To measure them, businesses can use various tools and techniques, such as user feedback, surveys, A/B testing, or analytics tools like Google Analytics, User Zoom, Qualtrics, or Hotjar.
By constantly tracking and measuring ROI, KPIs, and other UI and UX metrics, you can gain insights into how users behave and respond to your software. From there, you can identify areas for improvement, optimizing your design for maximum impact.
Let’s overview the most important UI/UX design metrics you should pay attention to.
Essential UI metrics to evaluate your product’s appearance
To evaluate your UI design efforts, you can use a variety of metrics and KPIs that focus on different aspects of the visual design and aesthetics of your product. Particularly:
- Visual appeal
The visual appeal of software is quite subjective; however, it can still help you understand the attractiveness of your UI design through surveys or user feedback.
- Consistency
Another one of the most critical UI KPIs is design consistency. All your fonts, colors, layouts, and other elements should be consistent throughout the project to ensure the brand identity is sustained.
- Clarity
Ensure that your product’s user interface clearly and effectively communicates the information without misleading or confusing users and that they can easily understand how to interact with the website or application. This can be tracked via surveys, usability testing, or user feedback.
- Bounce rate
The bounce rate measures the percentage of users who leave your website or app without taking any action or interacting with any additional pages. A high bounce rate can help evaluate UI design and indicate whether it is too complex or not engaging enough.
Essential UX metrics to evaluate your product’s usability
User experience measurement is the number-one step to improving the effectiveness of your software. To evaluate your UX design efforts, consider tracking the following metrics:
- Responsiveness
Responsiveness refers to the speed and fluidity with which your app or website responds to user interactions and input. Regardless of the device, your software should be adapted to every user.
- User flow
The user flow is a visualization of how users navigate your website or app — for example, the actions they perform or how they move from one page to another. This can help you to identify areas of your UX design that may be causing confusion and make improvements to optimize user navigation.
- Task success rate
The task success rate helps measure UX in task completion, such as completing a registration form, signing up, or adding an item to a shopping cart. It is shown as the percentage of users who successfully completed a task without errors or customer support. This metric is calculated as the number of correctly completed tasks to the total number of attempts.
- Time on task
Time on task is another vital UX KPIs metric that refers to the time it takes for users to complete a task successfully. As a rule of thumb, the shorter the duration, the better the UX. This metric is calculated as the average time taken to complete one task to the total time to complete all tasks.
- Search vs. navigation
In case a user cannot find the necessary element via organic navigation, a search function is the next logical step to undertake. For UX, the less the search bar is used, the better. This metric is usually calculated as the number of completed tasks via navigation or search to the total number of completed tasks.
- User error rate
The user error rate KPI identifies the number of errors a user makes while completing a task, such as clicking on something that isn’t clickable, opening the wrong page, etc. This metric shows how user-friendly your website is for the average person and helps you to ensure the software you’ve created isn’t confused or misleading.
It can be calculated as either the number of errors to the total number of task attempts or the total number of errors for all users to the total number of error opportunities for all users.
- System usability scale
The system usability scale, or SUS, can help measure the usability of products or services. It is a test that allows participants to rate the software’s usability and learnability. The SUS is scored from 0–100, with 68 considered an above-average score.
- Net promoter score
The net promoter score, or NPS, is a metric that identifies the likelihood that customers will recommend the software product to others.
It can be calculated by asking users: “How likely are you to recommend this software to a friend or colleague on a scale of 0 to 10?” Based on ratings, the users are classified as promoters (ranks 9 or 10), passives (ranks 7 or 8), or detractors (ranks 6 or lower). Subtracting the percentage of detractors from the percentage of promoters yields the NPS.
- Customer satisfaction score
The customer satisfaction score, or CSAT, is one of the most important UX KPIs. It measures user satisfaction by asking them, “How satisfied are you with the software on a scale of 1 to 5?”
Checking a CSAT regularly helps you to track user satisfaction and learn how to change or improve your product, feature, or website.
- Conversion rate
The conversion rate (the number of users who performed the action to the number of those who have the opportunity) can also be used to evaluate UX and ROI. If the number of conversions grew after some visual changes, then you can be sure that this has made an impact on your revenue.
- Drop-off rate
The drop-off rate, or customer churn rate, shows how many people left the conversion funnel without performing a specific action. It can be calculated by tracking bounces over pages and identifying the funnel steps that caused this drop-off. Measuring the UX drop-off rate can help you understand your customer pain points.
- Retention rate
The retention rate analyzes the percentage of loyal customers and helps businesses to understand their position in the market compared to the competitors. It can be calculated by dividing your active users at the end of a certain period by the total number of active users you had at the beginning of that time.
The average retention rate should be in the 92-97% range. If you get a lower result, consider identifying some loopholes in your user experience design.