Data-Informed Product Design

Chapter 5. Using Data to Measure

Friends don’t let friends measure pageviews, ever.

Avinash Kaushik

Although most organizations are tracking a lot of metrics, they might not readily tie back to design decisions. Unique visitors can signal whether your marketing campaign worked, and social mentions can indicate whether you’ve got a great headline, but these metrics do not reveal much about the experience people have had using a site or application. Many metrics are marketing oriented, not experience oriented.

Measuring Ease of Use

Most UX metrics focus on ease of use. The most commonly employed usability metrics are performance measures such as time-on-task, success rate, or user errors. For the most part, these are measured through a combination of event tracking in analytics alongside usability testing.

At Change Sciences, our platform measures several usability metrics with a combination of custom analytics and video playback. The idea is to help organizations track ease-of-use against iterations of a site over time, and against competitors. Recently, we asked people to find a low-fee checking account on a dozen banking sites. This approach resulted in a success rate for the best site as well as some insights into why success rates for some sites were comparatively low.

UX is about more than just ease of use, of course. It is about motivations, attitudes, expectations, behavioral patterns, and constraints. It is about the types of interactions people have, how they feel about ...