The most effective metrics tell compelling stories.

Great metrics describe how you and your team are increasing the value of your products and services for customers, helping your business achieve its top priorities, and making the world better in the process.

For UX work, you want metrics showing how a great user experience has increased the value your customers and users receive. You want to show how investing in great UX has paid off by hitting business targets with great returns. And you want your metrics to describe how you’re improving the lives of your customers and users.

Not every metric helps you. Some even harm your efforts.

Unfortunately, you can’t do that with just any metric. The metrics that UX folk commonly use generally don’t tell attention-grabbing stories. 

Metrics like the time an average user spends on a page, click-through rates, bounce rates, or even conversion rates only indicate what someone did, not whether they had a great experience while doing it. For example, you don’t know if a longer time on a page helped the customer understand your offerings or if the page was confusing and difficult to navigate. Both would take longer and make for an unclear metric without a good story.

Measurements of how users feel about you, like their satisfaction (C-SAT), their loyalty (Net Promoter Score), or their assessment of the design’s usability (System Usability Score), don’t tell you anything about the experience your users are having. Their lack of definition can’t separate a poor experience from a bad day with nothing to do with you. And they don’t guide you on what to do differently in your design.

UX folks pick these metrics not because they’re effective at telling a compelling story but because they are easy to generate data for. Unfortunately, these metrics don’t help you make your case about your UX efforts’ significant contributions to your organization’s success.

Outcome-driven UX Metrics focus on the users’ experience.

You will start with your team’s current UX outcomes when you craft your outcome-driven UX metrics. These outcome statements describe the improvements you’ll make in the lives of your users and customers.

Here are some examples of how teams have used outcome-driven UX metrics to tell stories of their contributions and successes: 

• A UX team working on electronic healthcare records crafted outcome-driven UX metrics that told the story of how doctors now spend more time with patients and less time entering data into the database. Their metrics showed that time with patients increased while time entering data decreased due to the team’s improvements in the system.
  

• Another team working on a Customs port-of-entry logistics system used their outcome-driven UX metrics to share how their design changes, along with new API integration, reduced port inspection times by more than a million hours in one year, which reduced end-customer delivery delays and enhanced their customers’ supply-chain monitoring.
  

• A team working on an in-classroom product that monitors student progress used outcome-driven UX metrics to demonstrate how teachers could focus more on students struggling the most with new lessons. Their metrics became instrumental in boosting sales to new school districts.

Outcome-driven UX metrics tell stories about the real-life improvements that users and customers see from better UX. Conventional UX metrics, like time on page or customer satisfaction, don’t come close to having the same impact.

If you want everyone in your organization to see the benefit of investing in great UX, you need outcome-driven UX metrics to tell your story.

Check out everything you’ll learn in this course.