What are the best usability metrics to improve your design decisions?

1 What are usability metrics?

Usability metrics are quantitative indicators that measure how well users can interact with your product. They can help you answer questions such as: How easy is it to learn and use your product? How satisfied are users with their experience? How efficient and accurate are users in completing their tasks? How often do users encounter errors or problems?

2 Types of usability metrics

Usability metrics capture different aspects of usability, and there are several common ones to consider. Effectiveness metrics measure how well users can achieve their goals with your product, such as success rate, completion rate, or task accuracy. Efficiency metrics track how quickly and smoothly users can complete their tasks with your product, such as time on task, clicks, or keystrokes. Satisfaction metrics measure how users feel about their interaction with your product, such as ratings, surveys, or feedback. Error metrics measure how often and how severely users encounter errors or difficulties with your product, like error rate, error severity, or abandonment rate.

3 How to choose usability metrics

Selecting the correct usability metrics is contingent upon a variety of factors, such as your research objectives, the type of product being tested, the user context, and the method of testing. To determine the right metrics, consider what you want to learn from your usability tests, what features and functions your product has, who your users are, what they require and anticipate, how they use your product in their environment, and the tools and techniques used to collect and analyze data.

4 How to use usability metrics

Usability metrics can be used to improve your design decisions in several ways, such as comparing and benchmarking results with previous versions, competitors, or industry standards; identifying and prioritizing the most critical and frequent usability issues; evaluating and validating solutions; and communicating and convincing stakeholders of the value of usability testing. With metrics, you can see how your product performs and where it can improve, as well as identify issues that affect users. Furthermore, metrics can be used to evaluate the impact of design changes and validate whether they solve usability issues or create new ones. In addition, you can use your metrics to communicate findings and recommendations to stakeholders.

5 Examples of usability metrics

Usability metrics can help you make informed design decisions. For example, if you are testing a new e-commerce website, you can use metrics such as completion rate, time on task, clicks, ratings, and feedback to evaluate the effectiveness, efficiency, and satisfaction of your users. When testing a mobile app, success rate, task accuracy, error rate, error severity, and ratings can be used to assess the effectiveness, error, and satisfaction of your users. Finally, if you are testing a new software, you can use completion rate, time on task, error rate, error severity, and feedback to evaluate the effectiveness, efficiency, error, and satisfaction of your users.

6 Here’s what else to consider

This is a space to share examples, stories, or insights that don’t fit into any of the previous sections. What else would you like to add?