Research: Metrics

Metrics are the signals that show whether your UX strategy is working. Using metrics is key to tracking changes over time, benchmarking against iterations of your own site or application or those of competitors, and setting targets.

Although most organizations are tracking metrics like conversion rate or engagement time, often they do not tie these metrics back to design decisions. The reason? Their metrics are too high level. A change in your conversion rate could relate to a design change, a promotion, or something that a competitor has done. Time on site could mean anything. Read More

What is a confidence interval? I wanted to know that recently and turned to one of my favorite books: Measuring the User Experience, by Tom Tullis and Bill Albert. And here’s what they say:

“Confidence intervals are extremely valuable for any usability professional. A confidence interval is a range that estimates the true population value for a statistic.”

Then they go on to explain how you calculate a confidence interval in Excel. Which is fine, but I have to admit that I wasn’t entirely sure that once I’d calculated it, I really knew what I’d done or what it meant. So I trawled through various statistics books to gain a better understanding of confidence intervals, and this column is the result. Read More

Eight years ago, on July 10, 2008, the iPhone App Store opened and the mobile app-development ecosystem was born. Then, just a few months later, on October 22, the Android Market came into being. Businesses, developers, and mobile users would never be the same. According to Statista, mobile app revenues are forecast to grow to $76.52 billion in 2017, which is roughly equal to $10 for every person on the face of the Earth!

Businesses that want to earn a share of this enormous mobile app–revenue pie must understand and track 12 key performance indicators (KPIs) that let them measure—and, in some cases, foretell—the success of their apps—or, in the case of 99% of all apps, their demise. With the help of these KPIs, you can better understand how well an app is doing and how users are engaging with the app. Gaining this understanding is a prerequisite to comprehending why an app is performing in a certain way and how to improve its user experience.

In this article, I’ll describe the 12 most important KPIs that will help you to measure the what before you can get to the why.  Read More