There isn’t a usability thermometer to tell you how usable your software or website is. Instead we rely on the impact of good and bad usability to assess the quality of the user experience. Here are 10 metrics you should be familiar with and ready to use in any usability evaluation. 1. Completion Rates: Often
Everything should be 1 click away. It takes too many clicks ! For as long as there have been websites it seems that there’s been a call to reduce the number of clicks to improve the user experience. This was especially the case after Amazon released its one-click purchase button in 1999. Executives, product managers
These are three of the most important words for anyone trying to make better decisions with data. I first heard them from Edward Tufte over a decade ago. You need a meaningful comparison to turn data into information. We’re often in such a hurry to get the survey out, start the usability test or conduct
Completion rates are the fundamental usability metric: A binary measure of pass and fail (coded as 1 or 0) provides a simple metric of success. If users cannot complete a task, not much else matters with respect to usability or utility. Easy to understand: They are easy to collect and easy to understand for both
If a user can’t find the information does it exist? The inability of users to find products, services and information is one of the biggest problems and opportunities for website designers. Knowing users’ goals and what top tasks they attempt on your website is an essential first step in any (re)design. Testing and improving these
It depends (you saw that coming). Context matters in deciding what a good completion rate is for a task, however, knowing what other task completion rates are can be a good guide for setting goals. An analysis of almost 1200 usability tasks shows that the average task-completion rate is 78%. The Fundamental Usability Metric A
Ask a user to complete a task and they can tell you how difficult it was to complete. But can a user tell you how difficult the task will be without even attempting it? It turns out the task description reveals much of the task’s complexity, so users can predict actual task ease and difficulty
A key aspect of usability is efficiency. Users should be able to complete tasks quickly. Efficiency is usually measured as time on task, one of the quintessential usability metrics. For transactional tasks done repeatedly, shaving a couple seconds off a time can mean saving minutes per day and hours per week for users (think Accounting,
In usability testing we ask users to complete tasks and often ask them to rate how difficult or easy the task was. Does it matter when you ask this question? What happens if we interrupt users during the task instead of asking it after the task experience is over? Almost ten years ago researchers at
There are many helpful books on usability testing. It is also helpful to know what actually happens in usability tests, including what metrics people collect. I asked MeasuringU newsletter subscribers to answer a few questions about how they measure usability. Sign up for weekly updates at the bottom of this page. In addition to the
