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Top 14 User Engagement Metrics for 2021
(... According to Experts)

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Leveraging Personas to Make Better Business Decisions 

Reading time: about 9 min

As a young boy I eagerly looked forward to Sunday nights. After dinner and a warm bath, I would sit in front of the television and watch The Muppet Show with my family. As a grade-schooler, it felt as if my family would invite the whole cast of characters into our household - Kermit, Miss Piggy, Fozzy Bear, the Swedish Chef, and Animal, to name a few. However, if any of these characters were really invited over for dinner, I suspect we might prepare each meal differently depending on who was our guest. Being sophisticated and expecting the finer things, Miss Piggy would demand we take out our fine china with fancy place settings. Clearly, we would not serve bacon-wrapped ANYTHING. On the other hand, Animal might have difficulty with foods that could not be cleaned up easily, like grape juice or spaghetti with marinara sauce, and we’d have to use paper plates. As host for this dinner, my family would need to thoughtfully consider each guest before making decisions about the meal we might serve. 

Similarly, in the workplace, we need to consider the unique needs and goals of each of the people we ultimately serve: the coworkers, users, beneficiaries (or whomever you consider your customers) of the programs, products, services, or even policies that impact them. Short of involving our customers in every step of our work to influence our business decisions, we can leverage personas. Personas are fictitious, specific, and concrete representations of  target customer groups for a product or service that creates a sense of empathy for real customers. They provide an actionable narrative that leverages research, as well as internal understandings. 

THE SAD TRUTH

Personas are the result of rigorous research, often a combination of qualitative and quantitative research. There are different types of personas too, depending on the need. Marketing-focused personas help businesses make decisions based on their understanding of their current or future customers. These personas often benefit for-profit companies who seek to make revenue-based decisions for attracting and retaining customers. On the other hand, product-focused personas help businesses make decisions based on the behaviors, needs, and goals of users of their products. These personas benefit companies who produce digital or physical products, informing such things as the product roadmap or features that might best meet the desires of its user base. 

Unfortunately, in the product space, these personas are often left collecting dust on the shelf. Why? There are a few common reasons, including:

• Focus on Tech: Technical teams may be so solution-focused that they prioritize their understanding of system roles and permissions rather than taking the time to gain empathy for real people and their usage stories. They may think that it’s not their responsibility to have a deep understanding of their users’ needs and goals. 
• Focus on Business Goals: Businesses build roadmaps based on organizational drivers and may not regularly collect or consider customer feedback. They may think that it’s not their responsibility to have a deep understanding of their users’ needs and goals. 

• Focus on Delivery: Product teams sometimes rush to a solution before understanding or addressing the right problem. These teams design and develop for themselves, assuming they know what’s best for their users. They may think that it’s not their responsibility to have a deep understanding of their users’ needs and goals. 

In my experience, successful teams do not only focus on their own skill sets and individual responsibilities. They share the critical responsibility of knowing who their users are and understanding their unique needs and goals. One design leader I look up to argues that it is the responsibility of everyone on a product team to “embrace regular and frequent exposure to users.​ 2 hours every 6 weeks​.” (Jared Spool, User Interface Engineering). While that may be impossible to achieve, it begs the question, when was the last time you observed customers using your product or service? 

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GETTING STARTED

If you’ve ever attended the “Introduction to Human-Centered Design” training offered to the community, we sometimes ask attendees, “Who is your customer?” Regularly we hear attendees respond with one name, such as “beneficiary” or “coworker.” The fact is that each of us should be able to identify at least three customers who benefit from our work. So first, we must identify those unique people types that benefit from our product or service. Even if you do not have a research-focused person on your team, you can develop what is called “proto personas,” which are hypothesis-based, unvalidated by real users. Take some time to document what you already know – locate background materials stored somewhere. Speak to people in your organization who have interacted with these people. Analyze quantitative data stored in a database somewhere. Or simply recall experiences you’ve had interacting with these people. While there is no universally accepted format or style to tell this person’s story, there are a few things we might include. In fact, after an analysis of various personas created across this community of application development organizations (ADOs), our team identified some common elements often included: 

Look no further! Here’s what a group of experts had to say about how they track user engagement.

User Activity (DAU, WAU, MAU)

User activity is typically measured within some temporal window: Daily Active Users (DAU), Weekly Active Users (WAU), or Monthly Active Users (MAU). Measuring user activity by using at least one of these metrics can show you how many unique users are actively using your product during a particular interval.

When calculating user activity, it’s important to determine what your team defines as an “active” user. Is it when they log in to your product? Is it when they click on a specific attribute or open a specific page? Once your team has defined what an active user is for your specific product, then you can find how many daily, weekly, or monthly users you have.

Stickiness 

It can be helpful for your team to know how “sticky” your product is. That is to say, how often are your users returning to use your product? We can find this by dividing your Daily Active Users by your Monthly Active Users.

Stickiness = DAU / MAU

So, if you have fifty Daily Active Users and a hundred Monthly Active Users, then your stickiness percentage is 50%. Your average user is using your product about half time, or 15 days out of a 30 day month.

Week #1 Engagement 

Similar to DAU or MAU is measuring engagement during a user’s first week in your product. If a user isn’t directly engaging with your product within the first week that they gain access to it, it’s highly likely they won’t be coming back. Tracking week one engagement can also reveal any kinks in the onboarding process you may have, or show how intuitive your product really is to a new user.

Number of logins

Likely, you define an active user as someone who does more than just log in to your product, however tracking the number of logins can still be helpful. I mean, they can’t be using your product if they aren’t logging in, right? 

Deciding whether to track logins on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis will depend on your product and how often your average user should be logging in. After deciding on what works best for you and your team, tracking logins can help you spot if a user is trending towards less engagement with your product or isn’t using it as frequently.

(Segmented) User Retention 

Segmenting your user retention rates can be very helpful to see when the dropoff point in your specific product seems to occur. Looking at user retention after day one, day seven, and day thirty can help you identify when users are leaving your product. A typical user retention curve looks like this:

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The goal of looking at user retention in this way is to improve user engagement at all points of their experience within your product and move that curve upwards.

Time In-App

Another useful metric is looking at how long your users are staying in your app. A user can open your product a hundred times, but if they’re only staying in it for a few seconds or even minutes, they likely aren’t getting enough value out of it. It is important to note here, however, that this metric will be totally dependent on your product and how it’s designed to be used. If you are a weather app, then a user staying on your app for longer than a minute or so might actually show that your product is too confusing, since it shouldn’t take them that long to check the weather. 

This is why it’s important to measure the average amount of time a user stays in your app. That way, you have a benchmark to compare a single user to, and you can more easily see if a user is spending too much or too little time on your app.

Number of returning users

New customers are great to have, and increasing the top of your funnel with new users can be crucial to growing your business. But if users are trying your product once and never coming back, then that means that they’re not seeing the value in your product or are not fully understanding it. This can be a huge problem as it will increase your churn rate and can stunt your company’s growth. 

Tracking the number of users returning to your product shows you how many users are getting value from your product versus those who aren’t. You can then target those users who aren’t getting as much value out of your product with additional messaging or educational materials. If you have a low percentage of returning users, you may want to reach out to those users and see why they haven’t returned or send along some helpful tips and tricks to get them to come back.

Feature Usage

Tracking which features are used, how frequently they’re being used, and who is actually using them can all be super helpful to your team. If you have a feature that is never being used, it may indicate that users just don’t find value in it and it may be time to get rid of that functionality, which will save you and your team a ton of time and money. On the flip side, if there is a certain feature that is getting a ton of usage, it may be helpful to look into why your users find it so valuable and if you can expand on it in a certain way.

It’s also important to look at who is using which features. If you have a less popular feature, however the users who actually use it are your highest paying customers, you are likely not going to get rid of it any time soon.

Net Promoter Score (NPS) 

NPS typically asks your users to rate on a scale from 1-10 how likely they are to recommend your product to someone else. Typically, those who rated 1-6 are considered “Detractors”, those who rated 7-8 are considered “Neutrals”, and those who rated 9-10 are considered “Promoters”. You can then find your NPS score by subtracting the percentage of “Detractors” from the percentage of “Promoters”.

NPS= % Promoters – % Detractors

So for example, if you have 68% “Promoters” and 10% “Detractors”, then you have an NPS score of 58. NPS can be a helpful metric, however it is highly speculative in nature; “How likely are you to recommend the product?” Instead, we suggest using aNPS, or Actual NPS. aNPS asks the user, “Have you already recommended the product? Why or why not?” This will give you much more actionable insight and data.

Feedback response rates 

One of the most important things you can do when trying to validate your ideas for potential new features or gather information is to ask your users for feedback. After all, who knows better what your users want than your users? Having a high feedback response rate shows that your users care enough about your product to put in the time and effort to give you feedback, and can be a great indicator of a motivated user population. 

Bounce rate 

Your bounce rate is the percentage of people who click away from your site after viewing only one page. A high bounce rate can mean that your users aren’t finding value in your product, aren’t understanding your product, or aren’t engaging well with your product.

However, bounce rates can be deceiving. A user may just have a question on pricing, or need a quick refresher on a question they had, so going to just one page in your product could satisfy their need. It’s important to keep this in mind when analyzing your bounce rate.

Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT)

We’ve all received customer satisfaction surveys; essentially, CSAT shows shows a user’s overall content or discontent with your product. You ask your users to rank your product on a scale (1-3, 1-5, 1-10, etc.) and then you take the sum of the scores divided by the number of respondents. While NPS measures overall satisfaction, CSAT typically measures a user’s satisfaction with a certain feature inside of your product. This metric is most effective when you use it at the exact moment they just finished using that feature during their journey through your product.

Abandonment rate 

Abandonment rate is the percentage at which a user will abandon their virtual shopping cart when checking out online. You can calculate it by taking the number of abandoned carts and dividing it by the total number of users who completed the sale.

Abandonment rate = # of users who abandoned their carts / total # of users who completed the sale

Conversion rate

There are certain actions you want your users to take within your product, whether that be opening a certain page or using a certain feature. These actions can be tracked as conversions, and you can calculate your conversion rate by taking the number of users who complete those actions and dividing it by your total number of users.

Conversion rate = # of users who completed action / total # of users

So, if you have ten users who used a new page in your product and a hundred total users, then you have a conversion rate of 10% for that new page. This metric can be super helpful in seeing how quickly your user population adopts a new feature or how much of your product they are actually using and exploring.

Now once these hypothesis or assumption-based proto personas are developed, it’s time to validate them. Set up time to talk to these target users. Ask questions. Really uncover their needs and goals. Be prepared to tell a rich story about these people. The story should not just be about using your product or service. Delve into what makes each persona group unique. The goal is to share each unique story with your team, not just so they have the facts, but so they can make empathy-informed decisions about the product or service. 

Image RemovedREAL WORLD USES 

So, once we bring back a proto persona or a fully validated persona, how can teams make better business decisions by leveraging these artifacts? My encouragement to you would be first to  consider the ways you might involve a real person in your day-to-day work cadences. Do you have recurring meetings where you discuss work that will impact your customer? Do you create project artifacts so that other team members have clear expectations about the work they are to produce? Clearly, we cannot invite our users to attend every meeting we attend and read every document produced to align our team. So, how might we creatively represent them, so they have a figurative seat at the table? The diagram here illustrates that we achieve the best solutions when our users are equally represented in our conversations and considered in our business decisions.

So how can we represent them? I offer a few creative options, including: 

• Create user stories that replace “user” or “role” with the actual name of your persona, and link to the persona for those who may be unfamiliar with their user types.
• Print out personas and decorate your workspace with them. Better yet, once we return together in person, post personas in communal spaces where they will get views, like lunchrooms or even bathrooms!  
• Create a cardboard cutout of each persona and have team members adopt one and take it with them to physical meetings. Or, if virtual, create a digital headshot and have team members sign in 2 times to your web meeting, once as you and once representing one of your personas. 
• Create trading cards for a team-building activity or for new employee onboarding. Pass out a stack of trading cards that only represent 1 of many personas. Your job is to talk with other team members and trade so that you end up with a full set. 

Now some forty-something years later, as a parent I sometimes slip into the role of a Muppet Show character. While my wife is strong in her impression of Miss Piggy, I do a mean Kermit as well as Swedish Chef impression. With my 5-year-old, my antics are well-received and memorable for her. For my teenage daughters, they are memorable, just for another reason. As I think back to my own best experience using personas, I recall a meeting I had with the development team. Being in the edtech space, I likely created some silly name for this persona like “Edith Educator” or something along those lines. And I remember as the team was negotiating the level of effort required to create a feature, one cantankerous engineer stated matter-of-factly, “This feature would not be delightful enough for Edith, who has to use this capability every day!” I just about fell out of my seat. That is why we create and infuse persona artifacts into the everyday cadence of our teams. Make them representative. Make them memorable. Use them every day. 

READY. SET. GO. 

So what are you waiting for? We don’t want to leave you hanging without any way to take action. Did you know that there’s a template we’ve put together to get you started? We even have a page on our site where we store enterprise personas that we’ve developed for our projects. See if any of these can get you started, or even consider becoming an expert by attending a persona training class offered by the HCD Center of Excellence.  

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