11 essential UX metrics to improve user experience

If you care about enhancing your customer experience (CX), you must pay attention to your user experience (UX). 

UX is a critical branch of CX because a bad user experience will leave you with unhappy customers. Unhappy customers don’t stick around. 

So how do you prioritize and improve user experience? It starts with tracking UX metrics to make data-driven enhancements.

In this guide, we’ll break it all down:

User experience (UX) is how people interact with or experience your product, app, or website. Have you made it easy and intuitive for users to solve a problem or fulfill a need? Or are they stuck in a frustration loop?

User experience is part of the bigger CX ecosystem, including the digital experience (DX) and user interface (UI). 

Digital experience is all the interactions a customer has with an organization via digital touchpoints—website, app, social media, etc.—and the feelings or perceptions the customer has about those interactions.  

User interface is every element impacting user interaction on a device, website, or app. This encompasses buttons, icons, spacing, typography, responsive design, and more. 

Here’s how CX, UX, and DX overlap:

Related: How to use UX surveys to test ideas

UX metrics are quantitative and qualitative datapoints showing the quality of people’s interactions with your product, app, or website. You can use them to measure, compare, and track the effectiveness of your UX design strategy. 

A great user experience results in more satisfied users, higher conversion rates, and fewer technical issues—which reduces business costs in the long run. 

On their own, UX metrics are user-focused, not business-focused. But what’s good for the user is good for the business. For example, UX could play a big role if your business aims to improve customer retention and loyalty. A user experience that’s easy and pleasant is an experience that will spark brand advocates and repeat customers. 

There are two major types of UX metrics: behavioral and attitudinal. Understanding the difference comes down to whether you’re measuring the behavior of a user (e.g., how long it took users to complete a task) or the attitude of a user (e.g., how confident users felt as they navigated the task.)

Behavioral metrics are typically quantitative and measure the actions users take when they interact with your product. How often do users use your mobile app? How long does it take? What pages do they view? 

You can often track behavioral metrics automatically, without intervening with the user experience, through site/app analytics, user session data, bug reviews, and more. However, this only provides one piece of the UX equation. While you might see data that shows that the experience broke down, you won’t know why, how the user felt about it, or what impact it had on them. That’s where attitudinal metrics come in.

Related: 10 brand metrics to track your performance 

Attitudinal metrics measure how users feel and what they say about your product. Do users think your app is easy to navigate? Do they find your website useful? How satisfied are they with the quality of your checkout experience?

Attitudinal metrics can be both quantitative and qualitative. For example, the quantitative NPS rating and qualitative NPS feedback provided in a follow-up open-ended question.

While behavioral and attitudinal are the overarching types of user experience metrics, it can also be helpful to break metrics down based on specific focus areas. For example…

Want to know how efficient your website flow is? Usability metrics pinpoint ease of use and include behavioral data such as task completion rate or number of errors. 

Is your customer engagement dipping because of user experience? It pays to track behavioral data like page views and session duration and prioritize qualitative attitudinal user feedback from open-ended survey questions.

What is your app doing right, and what can be improved? Satisfaction metrics, like Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) score, help clarify whether your user experience meets expectations. 

Completion time, also called time on task, is the time it takes for a user to complete a specific task within your website or app. This usability metric can be gathered through direct observation (e.g., sitting in a room with a user and noting their actions and time spent) or backend user analytics. Tracking completion time is smart because it’ll tell you if your system is working as intended and flag issues that could be causing customer satisfaction downturns.

On the attitudinal side, you can also uncover usability through your Customer Effort Score (CES). The data that a CES survey collects is self-reported—meaning, it’s the user’s perspective—and will show the effort it takes for someone to complete a task or interaction. Your UX should always aim for low-effort experiences to minimize frustration and get customers where they need to go faster.

Related Guide: Customer Effort Score (CES)

Error rate is how often a user makes a mistake while using your website or app. This could include clicking an area on a website that isn’t actually clickable or selecting the wrong page. Think of error rates as red flags in the user experience; they reflect pain points where customer expectations are not being met.

The System Usability Scale comprises ten specific ease-of-use questions, answered on a five-point agreement scale. SUS questions aren’t complicated and are typically asked through user surveys; however, the score itself is a bit complex to calculate, and you won’t end up with any diagnostic details about the user experience.

Conversion rate is the percentage of users who take a desired action on a website or app. This often means the percentage of website visitors who make a purchase. Conversion rate could also be the percentage of people who upgrade subscription packages, sign up for a newsletter, download an app, and more.

Conversion rate is a handy metric because it shows you what happens once people are on your website. If you spend a ton on ad campaigns to drive people to your site, your conversion rate will tell you whether they’re taking action once they get there. If the answer is a disappointing “no,” you may need to reconsider UX elements.

If your company is focused on retention, then you’ll want to pay attention to your return rate. This key metric refers to the percentage of users who come back to your website or app after their initial visit. 

Return rate can help you understand the ROI of user experience investments. For example, it’s a good sign if your return rate jumps after you make UI/UX improvements like adding more features or simplifying your checkout process.

Your Net Promoter Score shows how likely customers are to recommend your product, app, or website based on the experience they had. 

As a customer loyalty metric, it can reveal user experience issues, opportunities, or wins—if the standard closed-ended NPS question is followed with an open-ended question that gathers more details.

For example, let’s say people were giving you an NPS of 3. Without context from open-ended feedback, you wouldn’t know that those scores were due to a poor website experience.

Related: Net Promoter Score (NPS) best practices and tips for getting started

In today’s digital world, tracking loading time, or the time it takes for your website or app to fully load, is a must. If your digital experience is slow, chances are high that visitors will get frustrated and abandon your site—which will add up to an unsatisfying experience. Keep in mind that loading time can refer to: 

Are users invested in what they see on your website or app or just taking a cursory glance? Scroll depth measures how far they scroll down a page—showing if you’re keeping users engaged. 

This website metric gives you more context than page views, because it reveals which parts of a page might be attention-grabbing and which parts are losing eyes.

Satisfaction measures how satisfied the user is with the experience of your product or website, from the features to the functionality. Satisfaction with UX can be measured in the same way as customer satisfaction: using the Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT). 

CSAT is a multi-functional metric. It can give you a general view of customer emotion, or a magnified look at the mood around a specific topic, feature, or step in your customer journey. In most cases, CSAT is based on a 5-point scale from very unsatisfied to very satisfied.

To calculate the percentage of satisfied customers:

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