UX KPIs and user-centricity: please start with something and get results!
“Putting human at the center” — how many times have you heard or read this? How many times have you said it in design thinking workshops and other brainstorms? A lot. Too often because it has become a digital buzzword. What does this phrase mean in reality?
In the User Experience (UX) service or product design perspective, human is always at the center. Designers’ ultimate goal is to build experiences that bring them value and solve their irritations. But they are at the center through the whole process: when framing and concepting the idea, during the development and deployment phases; and after, while prioritizing and realizing new cycles.
Strangely, designers do not often have the reflex to measure the impact of their work. However, there is really no other way to ensure that the user stays at the center while decoding the other major triggers of product evolution such as the effects of technologies, the environment, etc.
For example, the Zoom application that we all know today was an answer to a user need, but also took advantage of the pandemic to really explode. Then, it almost sank due to technical (or ethical?) weaknesses. The context triggered an opportunity that they seized and ultimately succeeded in keeping their value proposition focused on needs.
The only way to get there is to find relevant landmarks, but this is tricky. Actually, it is both the lifeblood and the Achilles heel of many products. Yet, once you manage to successfully identify the right KPIs to measure and monitor user experience, these KPIs become a valuable decision-making tool that can be used at strategic levels. But it is also a complicated matter since it involves finding one’s way in an uncertain context in every respect. Here are a few tips to help you define the right metrics to be more user-centric!
Measuring user experience to stay user-centric: not always a prerequisite met
User centricity is key to delivering a good and seamless user experience.
You learn more in a day talking to customers than a week of brainstorming, a month of watching competitors, or a year of market research.
Aaron Levie, Box Co-founder & CEO
While we understand globally why “a day talking to customers” is valuable, its implementation is not so easy. Yet, user-centricity is much more than simply saying that users are at the center of our actions. It is a range of practices, rules, and rituals that allow to perfectly understand user needs, irritants, and motivations, and address them through the experience provided by the product.
In-depth knowledge of your user’s expectations and needs is crucial to building the value proposition of a product, solution, or project. Someone said:
It’s harder to make people want things than making things people want.
Designer’s proverb.
What we encounter in some cases is that when implementing certain products, the user’s needs are determined at the beginning but are not really followed afterward. Even if it is a good start, it is the opposite of user-centricity. It is a bit like admitting a patient to the hospital, administering them treatment, and then stopping to monitor treatment effects.
Assuming users’ expectations without checking them throughout the product life cycle does not make any sense. User experience measurement starts by defining the product’s objectives: it is precisely these objectives that will guide indicator choice the rest of the time.
Unfortunately, indicators are most widely used in the B2C domain (for example, for growth, conversion, and commitment objectives), but in B2B, the stakes are not less high. For example, user engagement, security, and efficiency are decisive indicators for certain products, as is the cost of development and management of legacy.
A simple user journey audit can save hundreds of thousands of euros in development costs if the journey indicators show that some of its branches are never used, and do not need to be maintained.
In addition to identifying indicators, the challenge is recognizing the salient clues in the information to be interpreted. For example, what should I do when a news release did not generate the expected engagement, despite the positive user feedback?
The scientist is not a person who gives the right answers, he is one who asks the right questions.
Claude Levi-Strauss, anthropologist
How to define metrics by asking “the right questions”
What makes a KPI relevant?
What is a good KPI? This is a complicated concept, as there are many possibilities and various situations. There is no standard KPI, such as the ideal number of clicks needed to perform a task, because KPIs vary with the product’s nature and complexity. For each product you will have to find the relevant information to monitor. The risk is to be overwhelmed by the mass of information that can be monitored, which leads to bad arbitrations.
A good KPI is an indicator that can be followed over time, it should not be fixed at a specific point in time. The ability to decrypt relevant trends in a set of KPIs and interpret it properly is key to drawing relevant conclusions and make informed decisions. The main issue is to combine monitoring several types of KPIs to cover major fields of the product.
So, defining the right metrics means finding the right combination of KPIs. There are three main types of KPIs:
- Behavioral KPIs: what is the user’s behavior? Explore user’s behavior by following the user’s product journey: when why and how do they use the product? Which pages do they use the most, in which order, etc.? This information can be obtained by tracking technical product information, like logging, page requests, etc., but also by tracking more specific UX metrics, such as on-page eye-tracking, heatmaps, etc. This can be measured continuously while using the tool, but also with a focus on a particular feature.
- Appreciation KPIS: how does the user appreciate the product? Understand what users think and say about the product. This type of information can be obtained via surveys, customer feedback, user meetings, or net promoter score (NPS). It is important to collect user perceptions at crucial moments and give users the maximum opportunity to express themselves. Structuring exchanges with users rather than soliciting them in an alleviatory manner is much more efficient. Also, remember that the moment you ask your users for feedback (in their experience with your product, in their day, etc.) will necessarily have an impact on it.
- Business KPIs: how does the product help to achieve business goals? For these, the user experience should be adapted to business objectives, such are new user acquisition, revenue growth, cost-saving, etc.
To find the best combination of KPIs, you should also ask yourself:
- How does the product help to achieve operational goals? What value does the user get from using the product. This value can be quantified as an appreciation or based on the accomplishment of the jobs to be done.
- What is happening elsewhere? Has the usage environment changed? How are competitors’ products evolving? Have users’ objectives or constraints changed?
Some tips to define the right metrics
Identifying your product’s objectives must be defined when designing or developing a product because it is precisely these objectives that will enable you to define the right KPIs. Then the way to approach them is also important:
- Take a holistic view of the experience, do not just count the touchpoints, and their own performances.
- As a starting point, focus on the most critical path — which steps are essential to delivering the expected result to the user? Put aside for the moment, the options, and the low probability cases (by the way, to know them, you need to measure it first!).
- Assess the risk of the change you want to implement. Based on your critical path, would this change bring enough value to be attempted?
Bonus gift tip: share user information as widely as possible in your organization. Create a dedicated channel for user test results, feedback, and other insights. Connect your prioritization processes to this channel. Share even beyond your team.
What ultimately matters are what we measure, because it varies according to the nature of the product:
- With a B2B, or internal product (dedicated to employees), the aim is to generate productivity gains using a more secure tool, leaving less room for human error. Therefore, you will measure employee efficiency improvement, comfort, and overall tool appreciation.
- A B2C product, on the other hand, generally aims to engage customers, improve conversions, and boost brand loyalty, to increase turnover: in this case, you will measure the number of users reached and their overall level of satisfaction.
Whatever the target audience, two fundamentals should be emphasized: simplicity and user autonomy. Tools must be easy to use and intuitive to ensure uncomplicated navigation. You can check these aspects by looking at the time spent on a page, the number of clicks to complete a task, or task and user-request response time, for instance. Finally, we can say that simplicity is a way to approach perfection.
Perfection is reached, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing more to take away.
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
How to start?
There are a lot of frameworks mixing different practices, such as HEART: happiness (appreciation), engagement (behavior), adoption (behavior), retention (behavior), and task success (behavior). But it always should be adopted to the product specificities and objectives.
If we must mention tools, the ones to get the information about the appreciation are probably the simplest. It is only necessary to send surveys or polls or to add rating scales (NPS type) to the interfaces. In this case, the issue is in the formulation of the questions and the moment of their submission. Ideally, you should focus on a given insight that you want to verify and avoid being too generic.
Do not ask your users if they find your interface user-friendly, you will leave with a pile of cognitive biases and unactionable conclusions. Instead, ask them what they think of a given page or feature.
To obtain behavioral indicators, it is often necessary to use specific tools, which are numerous and often specialized. Still, it can be interesting to dig into the monitoring tools that are already operational on the product, they sometimes propose to track specific UX KPIs, or they can be deduced from the logs of page visits, time spent on the pages, past requests, etc.
Bonus gift tip: if you are still lost, refer to the solutions and products competing with yours.
How ENGIE Design Studio can help to define the best KPIs for digital solutions
Many digital solutions have been developed since ENGIE Digital was created and the Group has moved to industrialize these products. The measurement of their effectiveness and performance has become more than ever a major issue. One of the Design Studio’s tasks is to embed this change in design practices to increasingly demonstrate the value of design and user-centricity through foresight. With our team of experts, we align business goals with the experience that the product should offer.
The Design Studio was created at ENGIE Digital’s inception since we launched the Experience Index a year and a half ago to allow all ENGIE group users to auto-evaluate their solutions. A lot of data has been collected and we now need to go further. The Experience Index is a lever to identify improvement areas in the team’s organization and its DNA to become more user-centric in the everyday team’s life! We still have a long way to go to improve user experience and make user-centricity a fully-fledged corporate culture.
Being user-centric is more than just a concept: it is methods, tools, and practices to become a corporate culture.
Find out more about ENGIE Design Studio here!
And if you wish to learn more about Experience Index, check out this article, written by yours truly 😉
