UX Benchmarking

When conducting UX benchmarking, having the proper knowledge and skills is vital to achieving accurate and meaningful results. Without these, it's easy to overlook important factors or make incorrect assumptions, leading to inaccurate or misleading conclusions. Here's how you can conduct UX benchmarking the right way:

1. Identify the Metrics That Matter

   Evaluating your digital product's user experience can be tricky, especially when choosing the right metrics. So how do you get started?
   

   First, you must focus on the key metrics that best reflect the quality of the user experience you want to achieve. These metrics should be aligned with UX and business goals to ensure optimal success. You can start with questions like:

   • Which digital product feature should we focus on more?
   • Who is your target user group - is it for a specific or broad audience?
   • Which tasks or features do you want to measure?
   • Are there particular interactions or workflows that are important to your users?

   These are just a few examples. You can even have a UX scorecard to help you identify areas to measure and improve. The answers to your questions will help you choose relevant and actionable metrics. Then, when you do it right, you have better chances to make that informed decision to improve your product.
   
   

2. Choose the Right Metrics

   Ready to pick the metrics for your UX research? Choose the proper research method first. There are factors to consider like time required, cost, and the skills of researchers involved. You want to avoid ending up with inaccurate data just because someone is not the right fit. It can be a very costly mistake!

   Look at your existing data on the user experience you want to measure. It will help you consider what type of research you will need to connect your metrics with your business goals. Here are three choices you can consider:

   • Quantitative usability testing: involves asking participants to perform top tasks in a system while researchers collect metrics like time on task, success rate, and satisfaction. This method can give you a good understanding of how users perform specific tasks.
   • Analytics: This method collects system-usage data, such as abandonment rates and feature adoption. Analytics can give you a broad understanding of how users engage with your product.
   • Surveys: This method involves asking users questions to report their behaviour, background, or opinions. You can collect metrics like task ease, satisfaction ratings, and net promoter score in surveys, which can help you understand user perceptions and attitudes.
   
   
3. Create a Baseline

   Now that you've chosen the right metrics to measure and methodology, it's time to gather your baseline data. Before you dive in, it's a good idea to conduct a pilot study first, where you will collect an initial sample of data and run a preliminary analysis to ensure that your methodology is sound. Doing the pilot study may help you make necessary adjustments to avoid mistakes when gathering your data.

   Here's a classic example: You use analytics to collect sales metrics for your e-commerce website. However, you need to note that marketing campaigns could impact your metrics. Planning around these factors can help you ensure more accurate and meaningful results.
   
   

4. Reimagine and Redesign Your Product

   The redesign process may be a lot to cover here, but developing multiple versions of your product and tracking improvements over time is necessary. As you go through this journey, it's good to keep in mind these (10) ten usability heuristics developed by Jakob Nielsen and Rolf Molich, a framework for evaluating the usability of your product and identifying areas for improvement:

   • Visibility of system status
   • Match between system and the real world
   • User control and freedom
   • Consistency and standards
   • Error prevention
   • Recognition rather than recall
   • Flexibility and efficiency of use
   • Aesthetic and minimalist design
   • Help users recognize, diagnose, and recover from errors
   • Help and documentation

   
   Remember these heuristics to ensure your redesigned product looks good, works well, and is easy for users to navigate.

5. Measure Again

   Once you launch your product redesign, it's essential to measure your design again to track progress and identify areas for further improvement. Unfortunately, no rigid rules determine the right time to collect data.

   For example, you can wait 2-3 weeks before measuring products accessed daily. For those who take more than once a week to do so, you can wait a month before measuring. The amount of time will depend on how frequently your users access the product.

   Please document factors impacting your findings when you start measuring your new design. These factors can be external, like market demand or other factors that affect your product's demand. Plan around these factors to ensure that your findings are meaningful.

6. Interpret and Share the Results

   Now that you've collected your data, it's time to make sense of what you've learned. First, remember that your metrics may only tell part of the story. For example, these sample sizes in your study are smaller than the actual number of your users. Statistical methods can help determine whether any differences in your data are real or just probabilities.

   As you analyse your data and prepare to share your findings with stakeholders, use the power of data storytelling to help them visualise the numbers, as well as quoting qualitative results from your users to help complete the picture - and, in the process, help you make a more compelling case for future product improvements and design changes.

Pros:

• Identifies areas for improvement: One of the key advantages of UX benchmarking is that it can help you identify areas of your product that need improvement. By comparing your product to industry benchmarks or previous versions, you can identify specific areas that need attention.
• Provides data-driven insights: Another advantage of benchmarking is that it allows for objective data about your product's performance. You can use this data to make decisions and justify product changes.
• Helps prioritise improvements: UX benchmarking can also help you to prioritise which changes to make first, which can be especially helpful when resources are limited.
• Track progress over time: By repeating benchmarking studies over time, you can track progress and measure the impact of changes made to your product, which is helpful if you have multiple products or work with bigger product teams.

Cons:

• Can be time-consuming: One of the main disadvantages of UX benchmarking is that it can be time-consuming. It will not be helpful for you if you need to make quick decisions or have limited resources. In this scenario, other UX testing features may be more suitable.
• Not represent your actual users: Benchmarking studies typically involve a small sample of users, which may not represent your real users and can limit the insights you gain.
• Can be hard to interpret: Finally, benchmarking data can be complex and challenging to diagnose. It is essential to have the right skills and tools to make sense of the data and turn it into actionable insights.

At Loop11, we understand the importance of involving the team. Working together to define clear goals and objectives is vital for your benchmarking study. Everyone must be on the same page about their goals and why. Doing this will keep everyone focused on collecting the right data for interpretation later.

Another important thing to do is tie your benchmarking metrics to your business and website KPIs. In other words, your benchmarking efforts must align with your overall business metrics. For example, if your company aims to increase the revenue of products they sell in the next three months, you should focus on metrics like average order value and conversion rate. Doing this will help communicate the impact of your data to stakeholders clearly and effectively.