2022-10-17 - Choosing UX

Metrics To Influence Important

Decisions
October 17, 2022 - Led by Jared Spool
Equipped with the right UX metrics, you can tremendously influence critical product
decisions. The right metrics will tell the story of how investing in UX enhancements will
dramatically improve your users' experience.
It’s not difficult to get those influential UX metrics. However, the usual approaches won’t
get you there. Persuasive metrics like these don’t come out of your analytics package or
focus on business objectives. Instead, they focus on what it’s like to be a user, precisely
showing what’s working and what isn’t.

Join Jared Spool to explore the best metrics for persuading key stakeholders to make
the user experience their team’s top priority. You’ll discover the power metrics have to
increase value to customers while raising the importance of great UX in the eyes of your
organization’s executives.
Come to this lively discussion to explore how you’ll…
… Identify metrics that tell the story of how your UX ideas will improve the lives of your
users, customers, and employees.
… Craft a compelling story of the importance of better UX by combining clear qualitative
and quantitative research findings.

2022-10-17 - Choosing UX Metrics To Influence Important Decisions 1

 … Drive home the damage that comes from delivering poor UX when you present
metrics about how much it currently costs your organization.

Before the talk gets started:

How this discussion will go:

20 - 30 minutes short presentation on today's topic.

Remainder of the time spent discussing your questions.

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Today’s Notes

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 Choosing UX Metrics To Influence Important Decisions
In an organization, numbers are used to give perspective.

Which problems are most important to tackle first?

Which solutions will deliver the best results?

Which options will achieve the business priorities the best?

Stakeholders and senior executives use numbers to know how to invest their time and
resources.

They use them to create priorities.

For example, last week we talked about a formula for prioritizing which features to build
next.
Priority = (Value ÷ Effort) x Confidence.

Value, Effort, and Confidence are numeric values.

They represent real world concepts using numbers.

Metrics tell a story.

Sales metrics tell the story about how sales are going.
And how they’re likely to go in the future.

Financial metrics tell the story of how finances are currently tracked.
And how they compare to how they tracked in the past.

UX metrics need to tell the story of what the users’ experiences are like.
And how they compare to what we want them to be.

Metrics don’t tell their story by themselves.

There’s always a qualitative component to it.

Sales can compare the number to projections to know if it’s good or bad.

2022-10-17 - Choosing UX Metrics To Influence Important Decisions 3

 Finance can compare the number to historical values to know if things are going
in the right direction.
UX metrics need to tell a story about why a better experience is good for the
organization.

Common approaches to choosing UX metrics don’t work

Many UX leaders try to keep qualitative research and quantitative research separate.
They’re often done by different people.

UX metrics treated as if they’re completely unrelated to the qualitative findings.

These UX leaders also often start by looking at the numbers.

They try to infer the experiences their users are having based on what the numbers
look like.

For example, they see a drop-off in a checkout sequence.

They try to explain it by inferring what’s happening.

Unfortunately, the numbers never cleanly translate into what might be observed.

Choosing UX metrics that tell your users’ stories

The most effective way to identify persuasive UX metrics is to start with the qualitative
research first.

We identify what to track based on what we see people do.

Anything we can observe can become a measurement.

Any measurements we track over time become metrics.

It’s as simple as that.

Analytics are measures that computers track.

They often don’t track the right numbers.

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 To choose influential metrics, we need to connect our observations to our vision.
We use our UX outcome to tell these stories.

The Persuasive UX Metrics Framework:

UX Outcomes
Answers the question: If we do a great job delivering a well-designed [Feature,
Product, or Service], how will we improve someone's life?

The improvement delivers some (hopefully dramatic) benefit to a person or

people.

UX Success Metrics

How will we know the exact moment that we've achieved our UX Outcome?
UX Progress Metrics

How far have we come on the way to achieving our UX Outcomes?

How much do we have left to go to achieve our UX Outcomes?

Problem-Value Metrics
What obstacles are preventing our users from achieving our UX Outcome?

How much are those obstacles costing our organization?

We need to start with the stakeholders’ priorities.

Can we articulate their priorities in terms of a UX Outcome?

If we can observe the outcome happening, then we can measure it.

We then construct a UX Success Metric to indicate the moment the outcome has been
achieved.

This becomes a target metric for the team.

It can be used as the objective in OKRs.

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 If we need to show progress, we can either use UX Progress Metrics or Problem-Value
Metrics.

UX Progress Metrics reflect changes that happen on the way to our UX Success
Metric.

We can use these as intermediate targets to achieve.

Problem-Value Metrics show the size of problems we need to solve to achieve our
UX Success Metric.

The goal is usually to reduce the size of a problem to zero.

Or some realistic low threshold.

Either UX Progress Metrics or Problem-Value Metrics can be the key results in
OKRs.

Every product or services metrics will be unique.

We want to tie them directly to the outcomes we want for our users.

Choosing UX metrics to influence important decisions

Our metrics need to tell a story.

That story needs to show how the organization is progressing towards better
experiences.

We can use the story to guide future decisions.

We start by understanding the decision outcomes that will deliver the best user
experiences.

We then use them to tell the story of how UX improvements are the best
investment.

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 Upcoming Talk UX Strategy topics.

Pushing Back When UX Isn’t the Organization’s Top Priority

Monday, October 24 at 2pm ET (18.00 GMT)

Calculating Poor UX’s Costs to Your Organization

Monday, October 31 at 2pm ET (18.00 GMT)

Leading a Strong UX Culture Inside Your Organization

Monday, November 7 at 2pm ET (18.00 GMT)

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