Are Your Investments in UI/UX Making a Good Return?
Your user interface could be okay, or even good, but being ‘good enough’ can cause your user interface to be less than what it could be. An excellent user interface can make an incredible impact on user experience and usability. A hard-to-use application will repel customers, so you need to know the difference between a good and bad interface before you can determine whether you made a good investment in a UI/UX service.
Good vs. Bad Interface
A bad interface can be responsible for multiple weak metrics on your website. For example, slow task processing increased errors, and bad data are some of the consequences to poor UX. Also, look for unreliable reports, higher training costs, low morale, slower onboarding, excessive help desk queries, and high staff turnover. An excellent interface will have the opposite of these issues.
What a Good Interface Looks Like
Susan Weinschenk, who advises Fortune 1000 companies, determined that a good UI/UX interface seeks to make the users’ life more comfortable. You can accomplish this with an interface that helps get a task done with minimum errors and little effort. The webmaster needs to know how to use the interface properly without extensive assistance or training. Users will also prefer it over other methods to get work done and need to remember how to use these methods the next time they log on. Users should know how to find things in a logical place.
How to Test a Good Interface
Conduct Usability Testing
An example of usability testing is the System Usability Scale (SUS), comprised of a ten-item questionnaire that helps UX professionals find and compile information about user testing. It’s also easy to use within a remote user testing environment which may be particularly important currently due to certain Covid-19 restrictions.
Usability metrics focus on the ease of tasks or event completion of each user. These include navigation vs. search, ease-of-use rating, task success rate, and more. Some advanced tracking involves interaction patterns.
Other ways to determine an excellent interface through usability testing is by engagement metrics or perception metrics, which has users interact with the app, software, or site and looks at how long it takes for the user to interact with it. Parameters include scrolling, page views, stream, and the attitude towards interaction.
Finally, a test can determine the outcome or conversion metrics. These are incredibly important for marketing teams because it looks at how likely a method used will create a customer of that product. It focuses on prolonged usage, engagement, and retention. NPS (Net Promoter Score) can help an interactive design firm find better ways for businesses to meet their goals.
PULSE Metrics and HEART Framework
Some insightful ways to determine metrics is through PULSE metrics and HEART framework. PULSE stands for page views, uptime, latency, seven-day active users, and earning. Although this method is better than the previously mentioned SUS and NPS models, the numbers can start to look redundant because it doesn’t look at new and returning users. HEART, on the other hand, fulfills the shortcomings of PULSE metrics.
HEART stands for happiness, engagement, adoption, retention, and task success. These categories has individual metrics that can be applied to an individual feature, which helps know the parameters associated with one or more categories. To further expand the HEART framework, the Goals-Signals-Metrics articulates the goals for your features, identifies the signals that will lead to this success, then tracks metrics on a dashboard. Combining these frameworks can give you precise information on whether or not your UI/UX experience is up to par.
Looking at all these methods by yourself can be difficult, and its why we recommend a company to do this for you. Once all the data is pulled, you can determine if your UI/UX investment is making a decent enough return, or if you need to tweak your user experience for better customer retention.
