The Ultimate List of UX Metrics: 22 Examples

Properly measuring and analyzing UX metrics is crucial in proving the value of UX and UX design, identifying key areas for improvement in products, and informing true product-led growth! 

In this blog, we’ve assembled a list of UX metrics that you can start using right now to prove your success, gain stakeholder buy-in and UX/CX investment, make better products for your users, and make more money for your organization and yourself. Choosing and presenting truly persuasive UX metrics will help you show your stakeholders that you have an outcome-driven UX team that’s not just in it for the love of the work (We know — we love it too!) or to pull a paycheque.

Read on to learn about examples of metrics in UX and to get our full recommended UX metrics list!

What are UX metrics?

UX metrics are quantitative measures for evaluating different aspects of user experience on a high level. They’re useful in identifying UX-related issues and KPIs that might be impacting the business, benchmarking a product’s success against the industry, and of course, proving the (soon-to-be-undeniable) success of your UX design project outcomes.

You don’t have to be a UX director or consider yourself a design leader in order to start measuring user experiences… practitioners of any level can and SHOULD advocate for the value of design and their work!

CX Metrics vs UX Metrics

CX metrics measure a customer’s experience throughout a sales lifecycle, while UX metrics measure a user’s experience throughout a product lifecycle. Many CX and UX metrics overlap. 

For example, if your users are paying for your product, you’ll want to examine:

• How user experience affects engagement with the business (Did they cancel, upgrade or renew their subscription based on how much they enjoyed or didn’t enjoy using the product?)
• How customer experience affects engagement with the product (Did interactions with support or payments not meet customer expectations, and now those customers don’t want to use the product, even if they liked it before?)

UX Metrics vs KPIs

Key performance indicators (KPIs) measure business goals, while UX metrics measure specific aspects of a user experience. Using UX metrics effectively means converting them into KPIs that your stakeholders can understand and appreciate. From there, you want to connect those KPIs to ROI. (More on this in the next section!)

Note: If what you’re doing is actually digital service design in the public sector, you might not be directly selling anything, so you’ll be looking for ways to help your stakeholders justify the expense of maintaining or evolving certain aspects of a product/digitized service.

UX Metrics vs Business Metrics

Business metrics include any measurements that relate to a business’s cost, revenue and profits, while UX metrics include any measurements related to (you guessed it) user experience. BUT, it’s important to note that the right UX metrics absolutely CAN impact the business and its ROI. 

Let’s get into how that works!

How to Choose the Right UX Metrics

When you’re choosing UX metrics to track and report on, you should connect product performance to the stage of the product lifecycle you’re focused on enhancing. Of course, it’s also fundamentally important that you connect performance to the relevant business KPIs that your stakeholders are focused on achieving. 

Let’s break that down in more detail.

Here are our best tips for choosing the right UX metrics:

• Start with the product lifecycle stage you’ve been targeting with your UX research and design efforts. How can you demonstrate product-led growth via your work? We find that the Product-Led Growth (PLG) Flywheel is a great resource for thinking about how your UX design initiatives contribute to adoption, retention, advocacy, etc. within the framing of business growth.

• Choose UX metrics you can connect to organizational KPIs that your client and/or organization cares about and actively measures or should be measuring. You might need to do some investigating — hold stakeholder interviews and dig through company documentation. For example, you might find some much-needed business context in your organization’s mission or vision statements, their annual/five-year plan, town hall slide decks, etc.

• • • In your interviews with stakeholders, you might ask them to spell some things out for you for alignment and clarity: 
      • • “Why did we choose these initiatives for this year?” 
        • “How do they relate to our goals?” 
        • “What does the board care about the most?”
        • “What do the executives care about?”

• Investigate, estimate and calculate the ROI of improved KPIs. (This video on calculating the ROI of design can help you absorb the process.) Your particular UX-based improvements might translate to optimizing business processes and/or driving growth for either your organization or its customers. There are a few ways to frame this:
  • • Cost/resource savings:
      • • Customer or organization example: Time on task saved (for users/customers or for internal employees), multiplied by the cost of paying those worked hours
    • Revenue growth: 
      • • Customer example: Increase in yearly projects completed, multiplied by the average projected revenue of each project
        • Organization example: Retention rate increase, multiplied by the total number of accounts (to give you the number of accounts retained) multiplied by the average customer lifetime value
  • • Risk mitigation/cost avoidance:
      • • Customer example: Non-compliance issues reduced, multiplied by the cost of non-compliance penalties
        • Organization example:  Reduction in churn rate, multiplied by the total number of accounts (to give you the number of accounts saved from churn), then multiplied by the average customer lifetime value
• Track metrics on an ongoing basis, especially if you’re working on a longer-term project. Those impressive numbers can add up exponentially over time!

• Be crystal clear about when you’re estimating ROI numbers in your reporting. Using estimates is fine (and typically, it’s your only choice), but make sure that no one ever mistakes them for exact numbers. 

• Preserve confidentiality for your organization by anonymizing case studies that include details of business metrics and dollar amounts.

• (This is a BIG one!) Don’t rely on numbers alone when identifying usability issues to address. These numbers are pulse checks or loose jumping-off points at best, not diagnostics! You don’t know the “why” behind any of this data unless you invest in qualitative user research (like observations, interviews, etc.), to find out what user motivations, behaviours and challenges are contributing to your numbers and their increases or decreases. Otherwise, it’s VERY easy to draw the wrong conclusions, gain false confidence in the wrong design direction, and cost businesses (and yourself) heaps of wasted resources. 

(Note: Choosing the right UX metrics is just one part of being a highly effective UX leader who’s 100% on top of their stakeholder management and DesignOps strategy. To get more content and resources like this blog AND the project management diagram below, check out the @Outwitly Instagram. We often post news about our free monthly UX webinar series!)

 

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22 Examples of Persuasive UX Metrics

It’s time let’s dive into our list of common measures for UX and UI design success: here are 22 examples of persuasive UX metrics!

Attitudinal Metrics in UX

Attitudinal metrics measure users’ attitudes about a product, a feature, and/or aspects of its related experiences. When you track this information over time, you can identify connections between changes in user satisfaction, changes in user behaviour, and the execution of UX initiatives. 

Warning: The data that this type of metric quantifies is self-reported, meaning that you’re relying on user memory and their ability to make fair assessments. As you can imagine, bias can easily play into these numbers!

To help mitigate bias as much as possible:

• Collect feedback from a balance of user groups and lifecycle stages
• Explain to users that honesty and accuracy will help you in creating better experiences for them
• Provide a text box for users to include an explanation of why they gave their rating (make it a mandatory field, and follow up if you get any invalid responses)

How to Measure User Satisfaction

You can collect user satisfaction metrics from your users/customers through surveys, in-app feedback tools, and third-party feedback tools, like SurveyMonkey, Typeform and Qualtrics.

1. System Usability Scale (SUS)

The System Usability Scale (SUS) is an indirect measurement that calculates a score based on users’ attitudes about your product or feature’s usability. This scale, which ranks products out of 100, uses a standardized questionnaire with ten statements about usability that respondents rank on a five-point scale from “strongly agree” to “strongly disagree.” Because this scale is so popular in the software industry, it can be a useful benchmark for comparing your usability to the average product on the market. (68 is a good average, 70+ is above average, and 80+ is considered excellent.) Just remember: this scale only measures your perceived usability in the eyes of users, so it should not be your only method of reporting on usability.

2. Customer Effort Score (CES)

Customer effort score tells you how easy to use your customers think your product or feature is. To measure CES, you’d typically ask your customers to choose a ranking between “very easy” and “very hard” on a five-point scale. While it can help you isolate usability in your feedback, it shouldn’t be considered on its own. Measure it in tandem with broader satisfaction scores, like NPS, as well as behavioural metrics related to usability and adoption.

3. Accessibility Compliance and Satisfaction Scores

Your product’s accessibility compliance score measures how well your product meets accessibility standards, while your accessibility satisfaction score measures how satisfied your users are with your product’s level of accessibility. These scores are becoming increasingly talked about in recent times (with good reason!), but they’re not universally defined in the industry— probably inclusive testing of accessibility/usability depends so much on context, like the type of business/product being offered, the users being targeted, the region in which a product is being offered, what regulations exist in those regions, etc. That being said, there are a number of accessibility evaluation tools out there that can help you get a start.

4. Feedback Response Rate

Feedback Response Rate tells you the percentage of your users/customers that have provided feedback on a given product, feature or release. This could be measured within a user group or within your whole customer base, depending on what you’re trying to understand or achieve. 

This metric is very important in helping you understand whether a repeating piece of feedback represents a significant portion of your customer/user base or not so that you can ensure you’re getting a holistic/balanced view.

What if your feedback response rate is low? Well, that could be an indication that you need to improve your feedback collection methods — you might need to make the feedback more enticing, engaging, or easier to provide. Explain why their perspectives are important to you, what you’ll do with the feedback, and consider providing a small, reasonable incentive.

5. Net Promoter Score (NPS)

Net Promoter Score is a popular metric (with a score out of 10) that measures the willingness of your users/customers to recommend your product or feature. It can help you understand what level of loyalty and satisfaction your customers feel toward your product and it can give you a starting point for finding advocates.

You’ll get scores from:

• Detractors (Who’ve given your product a rating of 0–6)
• Passives (Who’ve given your product a rating of 7–8)
• Promoters (Who’ve given your product a rating of 9–10)

To calculate Net Promoter Score:

1. Calculate your percentage of detractors
2. Calculate your percentage of promoters
3. Subtract the percentage of detractors from the percentage of promoters

For example, if you had 20% detractors, 30% passives and 50% promoters, your NPS would be 30.

Note: This score has a mixed reputation in the industry because it begs the question: “How often do users actually recommend software to other people?” In fact, if they don’t make a habit of it in general, then they might respond to the NPS questionnaire with a “Not at all likely” for every answer, even if they like your product. The image below has gone viral more than once for these very reasons:

Behavioural Metrics in UX

Behavioural UX metrics encompass adoption, productivity and engagement metrics. They help you quantify user behaviour when interacting with a product so you can investigate possible opportunities for product improvement or measure the effect of product improvement.

Warning: Even though behavioural metrics aren’t self-reporting, the data that comes from them can still contain bias and create false confidence. Like all quantitative data, it frames progress relative to past conditions and isolates figures from a holistic context full of unpredictable and changing factors. That being said, stakeholders really do love numbers… so proceed, but proceed with caution, and never make design decisions based solely on assumptions from your analytics! (Always bring in qualitative research with real users.)

Adoption Metrics in UX

Adoption metrics measure how users engage with a product, including how successful their interactions are, and how long they stay engaged with the product. They help you prove that your product’s ease of use, intuitive design, accessibility, etc. is enabling users to engage (or continue engaging) with the business. When you put these numbers in context with design improvement timelines and other metrics, you can show the correlation between great UX and growth!

(Side note: Want to gain influence among your stakeholders, earn their trust and gain their enthusiastic buy-in for UX and product-led growth? Get practical, step-by-step advice from our CEO’s CanUX conference presentation.)

How to Measure Adoption

Adoption metrics like retention, churn or lifetime value are typically measured by tracking new user sign-ups, installations or activations in a specific time frame, using customer relationship management tools (CRMs) like Salesforce or Hubspot. Often, customer success or account management will do this tracking. Other adoption metrics like active users or repeat users can be measured through product analytics tools like Mixpanel or Amplitude. 

If you’re working with a large organization that has a complex business model and loads of different features and offerings, you might want to suggest that your organization looks into Business Intelligence (BI) software. It can pull in data from multiple sources and give your stakeholders a holistic, integrated view of the bigger picture, as well as how their user experience might be playing into this picture.

Whatever you do: Work with your product and development team to see what makes the most sense with your budget, existing tech stack, etc. You need to be able to access this data easily for it to be useful to you and your organization.

6. Adoption Rate

Adoption rate is the percentage of your users that are actually using (i.e. have adopted) your product or a certain feature. For example, you might have some beta users who don’t touch a certain feature and your organization is trying to support a more successful launch. Or, you might have a number of totally inactive users who signed up for a free trial or even paid for a subscription to your product, but haven’t engaged with it at all. This is key information in investigating which offerings are worth improving, which might be obsolete, and which might need a total transformation by your UX design team.

7. Active Users

The “active users” metric is just as it sounds — it indicates the number of unique visitors who interact with a product or feature in an allotted time frame. For example, “MAU,” “WAU,” and “DAU” express this metric on a monthly, weekly or daily basis. This metric is similar to your Adoption Rate, but it gives you a numerical value instead of a percentage. It will likely only be meaningful in context with other information, like industry benchmarks for active users, number of active users lost or gained in comparative periods, the ratio of subscriptions to active users, etc.

8. Repeat Users

“Repeat users” refers to the percentage of your users who aren’t just returning to your product, but are repeating a specific action or journey multiple times, usually within a specific timeframe. For example, with a B2B Saas product, your customers might fill out a specific form in your platform as part of their regular working tasks. With a B2C product, your customers might use your product to order groceries, order an Uber, or download a movie. You might decide to measure the performance of a certain feature related to this action/journey based on how many repeat users you have vs projected to have, or that you gained or lost over time.

9. New vs Returning Users

Your new vs returning users is a comparative UX metric that tells you the percentage of your users that are new, versus the percentage of your users that are returning. It can be used to measure a product as a whole or an individual feature, and examine how much growth (or, potentially, how little!) is happening in your “activation” and “adoption” lifecycle stages. When dealing with website experience measurement, this metric would be called, “new vs returning visitors.”

Note: Returning users doesn’t necessarily just indicate users who unsubscribed from your product and then resubscribed! It includes users who stopped engaging/interacting with your product or feature for a defined period of time and then started again.

10. User or Customer Retention Rate (CRR)

Customer retention rate is a metric used to measure the percentage of customers that a business retains across a certain time frame. It’s calculated by taking the customers you ended with at the end of that timeframe, and dividing it by the number of customers you started with at the start of that timeframe.

In the same vein, user retention rate refers to the number of users that continue to use a product over time. This metric is most commonly referred to as “customer retention rate” across the private tech sector, though, because — let’s face it — if they’re not using it, they’re not going to pay for it!

11. User or Customer Churn Rate (CCR)

Customer churn rate gives you the percentage of customers that a business loses over a set time frame. Similar to retention rate (but the inverse), you use the number of lost accounts at the end of a given period and divide it by how many you had at the start. (Non-paid products created for public sector digital services might use the term “user retention rate.”)

Both customer retention rate and customer churn rate have a direct link to your organization’s revenue, so they’re the easiest to connect to ROI. Your challenge as effective UX leaders, practitioners or product/project managers will be in identifying how drops and spikes in these rates are affected by the experiences you’re designing, releasing, and improving over time. (Because, trust us, they definitely are affected!)

12. Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)

Customer lifetime value is a metric that estimates the total revenue or profit that a business expects to earn from an individual customer throughout the duration of their relationship with the company, expressed in currency. You might see this metric stated as “average customer lifetime value,” since each customer might vary, and businesses will often be trying to increase average value over time. If you’re dealing with organizational accounts, you can also measure this as “organization lifetime value” or “account lifetime value.”

While UX practitioners don’t have a direct influence on this metric (marketing, sales and customer success teams will play a bigger direct part), no customer is going to expand their subscription, increase their product usage, and stick with it for a long time if they don’t think it offers a worthwhile (or hopefully, delightful) experience.

13. Digital Literacy Rate

Digital literacy rate is both an adoption and productivity metric that calculates the percentage of active users who can successfully complete a task without assistance from support teams. It’s great to use in service digitization, and/or in markets where intended users typically have lower levels of tech-savvyness. It’s not as “official”/widely used as many other metrics in this list, but our UX contractors have used it, and we highly recommend it as a measure of successful digitization.

Productivity Metrics

Productivity metrics in UX can help you measure how effectively your users accomplish tasks and goals using your product. They answer questions like: “Did users complete the task or goal?” “Was it a quantifiable struggle or did it add value to their processes/lives and reduce their pain points?” “How has this changed over time, and before or after our latest UX-driven product update or transformation?”

How to Measure Productivity

Productivity metrics are usually measured with user behaviour analytics tools (again, like Mixpanel, Amplitude, etc.) and usability testing tools like Hotjar, Crazy Egg, and Lookback. For automation rate tracking specifically, you might need to use a more bespoke tool, depending on how your dev team is executing automations.

14. Task Success Rate and Transaction Success Rate

Task success rate (TSR) is a metric that measures the percentage of users who complete a specific task successfully using your product. This is usually measured through usability testing, where you can provide the user with a specific goal. With this metric, it doesn’t typically matter how they accomplished the task, as long as it was successful.

If the task you want to measure for success is technically a transaction, like making an in-app purchase, then it would be called the “transaction success rate,” but the idea at its core is the same.

These metrics indicate not only ease of use, but of functionality and user engagement in your product, all of which (it almost goes without saying) can significantly impact an experience and its likelihood of generating ROI.

15. Task Completion Rate

Task completion rate is the percentage of users who complete a specific task using the product. This metric can be tracked with analytics, and it’s best suited for measuring the usability of functions related to a linear, unambiguous process, where it’s already clear what users are intending to accomplish. To better understand this metric and how it differs from task success rate, we recommend checking out this video on completion vs success from Nielsen Norman Group.

16. Abandonment Rate

In the context of UX, abandonment rate is the percentage of users that exit a task before completing it, out of all users that started that task. This is essentially the inverse of your task completion rate. An analogous metric in ecommerce (when talking about transactions rather than tasks) would be “cart abandonment rate” or “checkout abandonment rate.”

17. User Error Rate

Just like it sounds, user error rate tells you the frequency of user errors that occur while a user is interacting with a product. It can be measured by calculating the percentage of tasks that users fail to complete, or fail to complete properly. Completing a task “properly” in this case means, “in the way that was intended, expected or needed.” 

Errors could include things like:

• Forgetting to fill or incorrectly filling specific fields in a form
• Accidentally hitting a button, or hitting it too early
• Incorrectly using drop-down selections or filters
• Accidentally overwriting or deleting inputted data

You can imagine how these errors could create a lot of inefficiencies and frustrations on the customer/user’s side, which could cause you to lose them altogether. And if your performance is being measured against your user’s specific accomplishments and efficiencies, you will see those KPIs suffer as user error rate goes up, and likely improve as user error rate goes down.

18. Time on Task

Time on task is the average amount of time spent by your users when completing a task through your product, or by employees completing a task related to serving customers.  (Note: The latter would be more of a service design use case.)

The metric can help you understand the relative complexity of different tasks, and it can also help you quantify the efficiency created by streamlining workflows through human-centered, design-led product improvements. The reason why we use averages is because every user will have different levels of experience and skill when it comes to doing certain activities, especially if the related processes are complex by nature.

If you’re proving ROI, try to get estimates of how much time these tasks took users or employees before your product improvement versus before it. This can be a great starting point for calculating cost/resource savings.

19. Automation Rate

Automation rate is a less common but very helpful metric for measuring the percentage of tasks that are completed in a process through automation, i.e. without manual work by humans. This measurement can help you prove efficiency and error reduction created by automation in your product (or digitized service), and it can help organizations and customers scale their processes. Use it in conjunction with the time on task and error rate metrics to solidify your evidence —  did these metrics improve as automation improved? If yes, then you know you’ve created more design-driven value.

Engagement Metrics

UX engagement metrics can help you drill down and quantify specific interactions that users are having with your product, and track them against your organization’s engagement, productivity, adoption and/or sales goals. For instance, you could examine feature usage and how that might relate to adoption rates, or you might look at screen views of in-app promotions, and how that might relate to completed transactions.

How to Measure Engagement

To measure engagement metrics, your best bet is to use a purpose-built tool like Google Analytics’ Firebase tool, Mixpanel (again), CleverTap, etc.

20. Click-Through Rate (CTR)

Click-through-rate (CTR) is a dynamic metric that measures the percentage of clicks that a certain button or link gets compared to how many times it appears (i.e. creates “impressions”) to users. That button or link will be labelled with some kind of call to action, even if it’s just the word “share.” If you’ve worked in website design or you’ve collaborated closely with marketing or SEO practitioners, these terms will sound familiar, because they’re used across all of these disciplines for varying purposes.

In the context of UX and UI design and UX writing, CTR can help you identify UX issues or marked improvements related to navigation flow, information architecture, visual hierarchy, and any other product elements designed to encourage users to click.

21. Screen Views

Screen views are a metric that can tell you how many times users view a particular screen within an application. It’s basically the app version of “page views” in website analytics. You can also think of it as a more detailed drill-down into the behaviours of repeat users. It can help you understand more about how a user is navigating through your product, how often they go through certain tasks in a period of time, and how many impressions a certain call to action is getting.

22. Average Session Duration

Average session duration is a popular website metric that can also be used to measure how long (on average) users spend using an application or looking at a specific app screen at a given time. To calculate it, you divide the total session duration from all users by the number of sessions in a given time period. This metric can give you signals about how engaged your users are with a product, feature or screen, how efficiently they navigate through a workflow, how long they spend reading information, or even how quickly they get frustrated and give up! (See also: bounce rate, which is a commonly used website/SEO metric.) As you can imagine, how you benchmark this can vary greatly, depending on what you want users to achieve.

Wow, that’s a lot of UX metrics. We hope that you found this article helpful! Just remember that your work ALWAYS has value… These metrics are just your way of providing evidence, so that your organization can make smarter, empowered decisions about their products in the future… hopefully using design strategy!

One last note: Best practice means that your UX research and design efforts should always be informed by KPIs to start with. If this hasn’t been common practice for you, but you want to start, please come talk to us about our corporate UX training! We don’t just do UX design staffing/recruiting — we’re big into knowledge-sharing, too.)