Developing a User Experience (UX) Measurement Plan

Measuring and improving the user experience of your product or service requires a plan and an understanding of who your users are. Whether your goal is to introduce guidance and processes for measuring user experience, or trying to scale UX in your organization, a well-devised plan will improve your chances of success. In addition, it can play a critical role in convincing stakeholders to invest in UX and make it an essential part of your product development process.

Key areas to consider when creating a UX measurement plan

Create a Communication Process

Schedule regular meetings with leadership across all teams involved in a product’s development to align the team around the outcomes of the measurements. Additionally the UX research lead or manager and the product manager team should meet regularly to discuss goals and outcomes for research projects as they relate to the overall business goals.

These regular meetings will have the following impact:

Allow an ongoing tracking and benchmarking of UX activities
Improve communication between research and product teams to keep them focused on the business goals
Foster a human-centered culture

UX Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)

When working with KPIs, it’s best to learn how each team within the organization measures success. Once you identify the KPIs you can associate UX measures to them. The following table provides some UX KPIs examples to help you get started.

Typical KPIs

Quantitative UX KPIs

Qualitative UX KPIs

Actual Behavior from Live Sites (Analytics)
Sales & Marketing
Financial Metrics
Customer Support Metrics

Task success rate
Time on task
Use of search vs. navigation
User error rate
System Usability Scale (SUS)

Reported expectations and performance
Overall satisfaction

Benchmarking Results

Benchmarking provides key metrics to track and measure product performance, and is an integral part of the overall UX process. The steps for implementing this phase of UX measurement are as follows:

Establish who on the team is responsible for tracking and communicating results
Determine frequency of measurement
Once you establish a timeline, track results over time making sure to note what UX research was conducted and what product changes were introduced between measuring each metrics.
Incorporate sample user videos or insights before and after changes have been made to demonstrate the improvements

Once you have set up the process of benchmarking and tracking goals with your research, you can begin calculating your team's ROI.

Continuous Improvement

Using the Agile principle of continuous improvement, along with the demonstrated value of user research, will help improve your organization's UX maturity by infusing user research into your regular development cycles.

Each team’s measurement plan may not be the same; the goals of this tip sheet is to get you started or evaluate your current plan. Developing and improving your measurement plan will help you stay focused on improvement while promoting the value of user research at the same time.

UX Measurement Plan Summary

Identify What KPIs are Needed	Understand how your program measures success to determine what KPIs metrics are needed. For example, Cost Savings, Burden Reduction, lower help desk support, etc.
Benchmark UX Quality Perceptions & Determine if you can Collect the KPIs	Once you have identified the KPIs you will want to be sure you have access or can collect these benchmarks along with some measure of the perception of the quality of User experience. Some examples of how you can measure UX quality perceptions include System Usability Scale (SUS), SUPR-Q (Standardized User Experience Percentile Rank Questionnaire) and Technology Acceptance Model (TAM).
Associate UX Measures with the Identified KPIs	Associate the UX measures to the KPI’s you have selected. For example, task completion rate with lower help desk support. More Information: Main UX KPIs & Usability Metrics
Track and Analyze Top Tasks	Track the top tasks: conduct a top task analysis to understand what tasks/functions are essential to your customers.
Benchmark the User Experience	Once you know the top tasks you will want to benchmark the user experience of the product and product functions that address the users’ top tasks. The following checklist can help get you started.
Create an Improvement Plan	Now that you have an idea where things are in the user experience you will need an improvement plan. This is where traditional UX methods can come into play.
Evaluate how the designs improved the KPIs	Understand how the changes in designs improved the KPIs. You will want to compare these KPIs over time and see what is having an impact and where you need to make changes. More Information: Statistical tests and Calculators.
Calculate the ROI	Now that you have made the changes to show how they have improved the user experience and KPIs, you can use the linkage to compute the return on the investment. This is how you can demonstrate the impacts of your design changes.
Conduct UX Audits	Conduct periodic UX Audits to ensure that your team incorporates any changes made during the development process and ensure the right methods and metrics are being collected. More Information: UX Audit Guide & 10 Usability Heuristics

Competitive UX Benchmarking

This webinar will explain the advantages of the 3 most recognized methods for measuring Usability & User Experience of a product or service: SUS (System Usability Scale), Supr -- Q and UX Score. (UserZoom, 3/14/14)

Statistical Significance in UX

An important component of measuring the User Experience of a website is to know exactly how it performs in comparison to its competitors and also to have the ability to monitor this performance over time. (UserZoom | 12/2/2014)