Analytics & Metrics Articles & Videos

  • Understanding User Pathways in Analytics

    While analytics cannot be the only source of data about user journeys, path reports can provide insights about potential issues, typical navigation routes, and the content that users interact with right before key actions.

  • "Why" Beats "What" in UX (UX Slogan #6)

    Data about what users do is valuable, but not nearly as valuable as information about why people did something. Such "why" insight should drive UX design decisions.

  • When to Use Which User-Experience Research Methods

    To help you know when to use which user-research method, 20 methods are mapped across 3 dimensions and over time within a typical product-development process.

  • Analytics vs. Quantitative Usability Testing

    Both UX research techniques help you gain quantitative insight into user behavior. Each method provides different types of information and can answer different kinds of research questions, however.

  • The 4 Factors of UX Maturity

    4 main factors (and 12 subfactors) should be considered to assess an organization's UX maturity: strategy, culture, process, and outcomes.

  • Prioritize UX Findings by Severity

    When reporting design issues after usability studies or heuristic evaluation, assign severity ratings based on a small set of criteria.

  • Recognize Strategic Opportunities with Long-Tail Data

    Be a strategic thinker by recognizing opportunities at scale with seemingly small and insignificant data.

  • Repeated User Actions Are Frustrating

    It's frustrating for users to go back-and-forth and back-and-forth to the same web page, bouncing around without getting what they need. Analytics data can help identify pages that don't help users progress.

  • Prioritize Quantitative Data with the Pareto Principle

    Prioritize the 20% of your website or app responsible for 80% of a critical metric to generate substantial improvements for less effort.

  • How to Sell UX: Translating UX to Business Value

    We speak users, whereas stakeholders speak business. We must translate: "if we do this for the user, it'll do that for the business."

  • Triangulation: Combine Findings from Multiple User Research Methods

    Improve design decisions by looking at the problem from multiple points of view: combine multiple types of data or data from several UX research methods.

  • Don't Overthink UX ROI

    It can be hard to calculate the return on investment (ROI) for user experience design improvements. But don't get bogged down in less-important details: often simple metrics can give a good-enough estimate to justify UX investments.

  • Better Charts for Analytics & Quantitative UX Data

    Spreadsheet defaults don't generate the most meaningful visualizations of UX data. Modify charts to enhance Context, Clutter (less of it than spreadsheet software likes!), and Contrast.

  • Partner with Other Research Teams in Your Organization

    To gain a holistic picture of your users, exchange data with the non-UX teams in your company who are collecting other forms of customer data, besides the user research you do yourself. You gain; they gain.

  • Statistically-Generated Personas

    Personas are usually a qualitative element in the UX design process, but statistical data from more users can be added for more precision, as long as the personas are still grounded in qualitative insights.

  • Handling Insignificance in UX Data

    After collecting KPI numbers for two versions of a design, the difference between the two metrics is not statistically significant. Now which version should you launch?

  • Why You Cannot Trust Numbers from Qualitative Usability Studies

    Qualitative usability studies have few users and variable protocol; numbers obtained from such studies are likely to poorly reflect the true behavior of your population due to large measurement errors.

  • How Useful Is the System Usability Scale (SUS) in UX Projects?

    SUS is a 35-year-old and thus well-established way to measure user satisfaction, but it is not the most recommended way of doing so in user research.

  • Net Promoter Score in User Experience

    Net Promoter Score (NPS) is a simple satisfaction metric that's collected in a single question. While easy to understand, it's insufficiently nuanced to help with detailed UX design decisions.

  • Benchmark Usability Testing

    Benchmark studies measure one or more KPIs (key performance indicators) of a user interface so that you can tell whether a redesign has measurably better (or worse) usability.