Introduction to User Experience

User Experience (UX) is a term that is used to refer to a deep understanding of the user’s or customer’s preferences, behaviors, values and their abilities. Through UX measurement, one can measure the attitudes and emotions of users regarding a certain product, service or a system. User experience includes the main aspects of the interaction between humans and the computer systems.

This very concept helps businesses fathom the kind of experiences users have while using either the products or services or the website or any other web platform of the company. They can know the ease of usage, the perception of the value of the system as well as the efficiency in performing certain tasks.

User experience or UX is continuously modified with respect to time and, for this reason, it is considered dynamic in nature. It changes with changes in circumstances and situations and is subjective in nature. In simple words, User experience can also be defined as how a person feels while using a system at a particular time. The system could be anything including a web application, a website, software or a hardware system. The overall purpose or aim of measuring UX is to improve the quality of the interaction of the users regarding a system.

History of User experience

It was in the 1990s that Donald Norman brought the term ‘User experience’ into wider knowledge. Earlier, this term was used to indicate a shift to take into account not just behavioral contexts but also affective factors. But even till date, several practitioners continue to research and evaluate these affective factors that are associated with end users or consumers.

There have been many developments that have led to a rise in the interest in user experience since then and they are given as follows:

• Improvements and advances in social, mobile and tangible computer systems and technologies into several areas of activities of humans.
• Combination of interests of several stakeholders in website designing too led to an increase in the interest levels. What happened was that those who were associated with branding and marketing needed to access the interactive part of this field in such a way that they could measure usability. But those who were concerned with website designing needed to consider branding, marketing as well as all the other aesthetical aspects. Thus, it was User Experience that offered a way to cover all these interests at the same time.

Measuring User Experience

If you are a business owner and own a website, then do you sometimes wonder why you have a lot of visitors on your website but not enough conversions? Have you ever given a thought to why the retention rate of visitors is low? Well, if you have these questions then only one thing can answer them accurately, and that is measuring the User Experience. Usability simply refers to the ease at which a user is when using a product or service offered by you and by measuring this, you can have answers to all your queries about the experience of the users. The following are some of the UX metrics that can help measure UX effectively.

What are UX Metrics?

UX metrics are a superb and powerful tool for measuring the performance of any system or product. UX metrics can be best used when they are combined with marketing metrics. UX metrics are slightly different from metrics that are used in marketing, finance or sales. The following are some of the most commonly used UX metrics:

1. Usability - One of the user experience metrics which proves useful and effective in measuring the customer’s opinions and preferences is the usability factor. This metric concentrates upon how easy it is for people or users to find what they are looking for and with how much ease can they accomplish what they aim to do. The following are some aspects of usability that UX teams are engaged in measuring in most of the cases:
   • Time on task – The time taken to complete a particular task or activity is one of the things that defines usability.
   • Task success – The success rate or nature of the task at hand is also one of the important aspects of overall usability.
   • Confusion moment – Usability also takes into account the number of moments of confusion that a user may face while performing a certain task.
   • Cue recognition – The ease of recognition of icons or cues too is measured when measuring usability.
   • Menu/navigation use – The ease of use of the navigation systems, drop-down menus and other menus too can be included.
2. Engagement - This is a highly crucial category of user metrics and is often considered the main aspect of overall user experience. UX teams spend a lot of time trying to figure out the nature of the interaction of engagement that users have with a system or site. The following are some of the factors that may be included in the broad category of engagement.
   • Attention minutes – The amount of attention that a user gives to a website is something that engagement may revolve around majorly.
   • Happiness rating – How good a user feels when using a system or website too is an important aspect covered in this category.
   • Flow state – The ease of flow from one block of information to another is the flow state and comes with engagement.
   • Total time reading – Total time spent on a website or particular portions of that website help to measure the level of engagement as well.
3. Conversion - Conversion is a crucial metric but is one that basically focuses only on that small percentage of users who seem interested in converting or have converted. For every business, it is important to know how many and how often do visitors convert into customers so that they can figure out the trends that are leading to this conversion and improve upon them further. The following are some of the factors that are encircled within this user metric.
   • Conversion rate – The exact rate of conversion is one of the most important factors included in this metric.
   • Likelihood to recommend, or NPS – Net promoter score (NPS) or the likelihood of a user recommending a product or service to another user.
   • Likelihood to take action – This factor measures the chances that a consumer is about to take an action such as order a product, try a service, etc.

Why is UX design important?

Before diving into the HEART framework, we want to give some context to its importance for your company.

To put it simply, UX attempts to fulfill the user's needs. It aims to deliver great experiences that encourage people to stay loyal to the product or service.

Furthermore, defining consumer journeys on your website that are most conducive to company success is made possible by a meaningful user experience. Let’s see what the following user experience statistics say:

These figures should be more than enough to grasp the significance of user experience in any organization's digital channels - online, mobile, and social media. This proves once more that designers, product managers or CTO as a Service dedicate much time and attention to the entire app user experience for a reason.

Discover UX/UI design tips to improve the customer experience in your product.

With the mobile app industry's rising, designers must effectively follow numerous metrics such as load time, app crashes, and user comments to understand each UX aspect completely. That’s when the proper tracking of user data with the HEART framework comes into play.

Typical mistakes when collecting UX metrics

1. Too much data, not enough knowledge - Marketing managers tend to obsess over figures. However, they rarely put second thought into their numbers.

   Do you really know the value of a visit to your website? Can you put a number on a visit even if that person doesn’t buy anything? If you’re only adding more data points—and not more decision-influencing knowledge—more tracking won’t help.