5 UX KPIs You Need To Track
As a business leader, setting KPIs is crucial for you to track your progress and see what isn’t working for you, especially if you have a newly established e-commerce or are looking to launch one.
From financial KPIs to operational KPIs and growth KPIs, there are many ways that you can leverage key performance indicators in your business’s favor. Leading electric vehicle maker Tesla does it; why shouldn’t you?
Table of contents
- A powerful tool
- KPIs vs. Metrics
- Keep this in mind while creating a KPI
- UX KPIs, your new best friend
- Why should you use UX KPIs?
- Top 5 game-changing UX KPIs
A powerful tool
Before we dive deeper into the essence of this piece, let’s kick it by highlighting the powers of KPIs.
A key performance indicator can help you evaluate the effectiveness of your efforts, make better-informed decisions as a business leader or senior executive, and hence strategically move every area of your business forward.
On a different level, KPIs can also provide targets for your teams to shoot for and are important to make sure your teams are moving in the same direction and supporting the overall goals of the company.
Not to forget that KPIs can help you make adjustments wherever and whenever you need to, by shedding a strong and sincere light on your successes and failures.
KPIs vs. Metrics
Now hold on for a moment. Do not confuse KPIs with metrics.
While KPIs show you how you’re performing in face of strategic goals, in other words, business outcomes such as targeted new customers per year or targeted quarterly revenue, metrics are here to support KPIs by tracking and measuring success against targets for much more specific actions such as website visits and monthly downloads.
In short, KPIs track whether you reached your business goals, whereas metrics track processes.
Keep this in mind while creating a KPI
Now that we set the record straight, let’s go back to our talk on key performance indicators. It’s important to know that KPIs don’t work like a magic spell.
They need to be tailored according to your business situation and should be developed to achieve your goals.
To be effective and serve its purpose, a key performance indicator needs to have a quantifiable target, a timeframe for accomplishment, a data source, and frequent reporting.
Constant monitoring can be a bit of a pain, but it’s crucial to the final result. Do not be afraid to fine-tune or completely change an already-set KPI if your business’s needs shift in a new direction.
Otherwise, your KPI will become obsolete, failing to capture the real impact of your efforts.
Here’s an example that practically brings what we just said to life. Let’s say your KPI is “50 New Clients FY2021”.
Deciphering this clear and specific KPI shows that your target would be to sign exactly a number of 50 clients, in a timeframe that ends with the passing of 2021. This KPI requires monthly reporting and data collection from a designated system or tool.
UX KPIs, your new best friend
However, did you know that you can also measure user experience?
Although user experience efforts are mostly directed towards improving the overall quality of user interactions, engagement, and satisfaction, all of which are qualitative outcomes, you can also quantify these efforts using UX KPIs.
“What gets measured, gets managed.”
-Peter Drucker, Management Consultant, and Author
The process of designing a good user experience focuses on creating a product that gives the designated user an efficient and pleasant experience, all while keeping the product’s consumption or use in mind.
In other words, it’s all about coming up with the easiest way possible for the user to navigate your product, all while completing desired actions and conveying important messages.
You can set a KPI that tracks how your UX is doing in the eyes and minds of your user and allows you to make better-informed design decisions and changes.
Now it may seem hard to translate human behavior, opinions, and feelings into numbers, but once you get your head in the game you will be glad you went through the hard work.
We know what you’re thinking. Analytics is just as specific and even easier to read and use.
Sure, the numbers provided by Google Analytics will show you what’s happening, but are they going to explain why they are happening?
The answer is no. Enter the game-changing UX KPIs. Still not convinced?
Let’s jump into the next part of this article where we give you too many good reasons to get in the KPI game.
Why should you use UX KPIs?
1. Early warning system
Instead of going through endless amounts of data, UX KPIs give you fast and accurate information about how your product is doing in reality. They can quickly determine whether something is going wrong so you can make the convenient intervention and fix it.
2. Stakeholder management
Proving your UX team’s effectiveness during or after a project will become a piece of cake after setting the right KPIs. These can also be great tools to help you communicate UX issues and provide reliable data when it comes to setting your annual UX budget.
3. UX benchmarking
UX KPIs can be a powerful business navigation tool, guiding you and protecting you from making the wrong move, thus saving time and money. They can also allow you to benchmark your project in comparison to competitors’ projects so you can figure out what homework you have left to do.
In terms of what exactly should be measured, your KPIs will change and vary from one UX project to the other, since different projects and goals require a specific set of KPIs to measure. Doing this will help you avoid unnecessary confusion and stay on top of things. In other words, it’s all about measuring KPIs that are truly relevant. The key to the success of your UX KPIs is starting to seem a bit easier, right?
However, and as we promised, we will talk about some extremely powerful UX KPIs you can use, just in case you’re still not sure where to begin when it comes to measuring user experience on your site.
Keep reading to discover the top 5 UX KPIs that you need to track if you want to enjoy high success rates in your online endeavors.
Top 5 game-changing UX KPIs
1. Task Success Rate
One of the most important UX KPIs, the task success rate, also known as the task completion rate, allows you to see how a user behaves when completing tasks on your site.
The types of tasks you choose to monitor will depend on your niche and may include purchasing a product, filling out a form, downloading an e-book, signing up for an email newsletter, or booking a consultation.
You can easily work out the task success rate of your website using the below formula:
Task rate success = Number of correctly completed tasks/total number of attempts
2. User Error Rate
Another vital UX KPI but one that is often overlooked, the user error rate, which refers to the number of times that a user makes a mistake when visiting your site. This could be navigating to the wrong page or inputting their details incorrectly on a contact form.
This UX KPI can be a good indicator of how user-friendly your website is and your overall website performance.
There are two ways to work out the user error rate on your website:
Error occurrence rate = Total number of errors that occurred for all users/total number of possible errors for users
Error rate = Number of errors/total number of attempts
3. Time on Task
This refers to the length of time that it takes for a user to successfully complete a task on your site. This can be measured in seconds and minutes, keeping in mind that the longer it takes for someone to complete a task, the poorer the overall user experience.
To determine your site’s time on task rate, you need to evaluate the average time users spend on each task on your site (this would be considered your UX KPI). If you notice that any task is taking too long, you should look to make changes to rectify this issue.
4. System Usability Scale
If you want to measure the usability of your products, then this is the UX KPI for you. The system usability scale (SUS) actively requires user participation to complete a 10-point questionnaire with 5 possible answers each and offers an insightful way to understand user perception of your site. If your website scores below 68 out of 100 then you need to optimize it.
5. Search vs. Navigation
A highly useful UX KPI, determining search vs. navigation is a great way to find out how easy your site is to navigate for users.
Typically, a user will use the navigation to get where they want to be, but they will turn to the search bar if this fails. If your search bar usage is high, this indicates that you need to overhaul your homepage and make it more user-friendly.
The bottom line is, there are endless tools that allow you to track different types of progress and success and on different scales. One of the most efficient ones out there is key performance indicators. Once set and measured correctly, your business will be transformed forever.
Do you need help with making your website more user-friendly?
Then, book a free consultation with our web design experts here today.