While task completion and task time are the default choices for measuring task effectiveness and task efficiency, the methods used to capture people’s feelings about an experience certainly seem more varied. But after measuring post-task perceptions for decades, we’ve found that a simple seven-point item does a good job of capturing not only perceptions of
We know that for a lot of UX professionals, quantitative UX research sounds like an oxymoron. You might have been involved in a few debates that included topics like: Whether you should even use numbers in UX research Which is the best UX metric to use Whether you’re using the right statistical test on your
In earlier articles, we identified 70+ UX metrics and provided guidance on how to select a metric. Seventy of anything is hard to keep track of, much less master. However, there are two ways to make that large list of metrics more approachable: The first is to decompose that list into logical groups (Figure 1).
In an earlier article, we showed that only about 9% of panel participants will eventually complete a study in which they are asked to think aloud. That is, if you need ten usable think-aloud videos, expect to invite around 111 participants. On the surface, this means you’ll need to plan for a lot of people
Over the past few months, we’ve conducted several studies with different versions of the seven-point Single Ease Question (SEQ®), a popular task-level metric for perceived ease-of-use. As we’ve seen with other research on rating scales, response means tend to be rather stable despite often salient changes to formatting. In our earlier SEQ research, we found
We use the seven-point Single Ease Question (SEQ®) frequently in our practice, as do many other UX researchers. One reason for its popularity is the body of research that started in the mid-2000s with the comparison of the SEQ to other similar short measures of perceived ease-of-use, the generation of a normative SEQ database, and
The seven-point Single Ease Question (SEQ®) has become a standard in assessing post-task perceptions of ease. Since the SEQ’s inception, we have collected data from thousands of task experiences to generate a normalized database of scores. We have also established its strong correlation to task completion and task time. Over the years, some researchers have
When quantifying the user experience of a product, app, or experience, we recommend using a mix of study-level and task-based UX metrics. While it’s not always feasible to assess a task experience (because of challenges with budgets, timelines, or access to products and users), observing participants attempt tasks can help uncover usability problems, informing designers
In Quantifying the User Experience, we recommend using a mix of task-level and study-level metrics, especially in benchmarking studies. But what, exactly, are task-level and study-level metrics, how do they differ, and why should you collect them both? In this article, we’ll explore this common practice of collecting both types of metrics to understand the
Task completion is one of the fundamental usability metrics. It’s the most common way to quantify the effectiveness of an interface. If users can’t do what they intend to accomplish, not much else matters. While that may seem like a straightforward concept, actually determining whether users are completing a task often isn’t as easy. The
