Measuring the performance of UX design
In Lean UX Process product updates happens almost every month. New features are added to the application as-and-when they are ready rather than waiting for the next big version to come. The request for new feature comes from multiple sources, like User Community, Marketing Team, Management etc The product designer would capture all of them and prioritize based on its criticality and technical feasibility.
In the rush of delivery, it is quit common that we may miss out some of the usability bugs till the live Product. It is important for us to have a system to capture those issues and fix it before it creates any impact. We don’t have to wait till the user to come back and report us.
Continuous improvement
No body is right at the first time
Only with continuous improvement, we can achieve the desired experience for the users. Release of a feature doesn’t marks the end of the design cycle, It also includes, tracking the performance of the feature and constantly improving it. If any issues identified at that stage, it should be taken as priority and immediate action should be taken. With actual people interacting to the live product, we can get more quantitative data which is a best source of several insights.
How do we Measure
Now the Big challenge is, how do we measure the performance? It is definitely not going to be possible by any manually methods, only with automated monitoring/tracking system we can measure this. Tools like Adobe Analytic, Google analytic can help us to track the overall performance of the application. But in our case we wanted to track the performance of a specific task, which is newly added to the product. Hence we need a probe to track a specific action or flow on the application and report it to Analytic.
Here is where Google Tag Managers (GTM) is helpful for us. With GTM it is possible to track a specific action or a flow on the application and report the data to analytic. It requires one time integration and later any trigger can be operate from with in the tools (GTM) itself. Similar to Google Tag Manager there are several other tools available on the market but as of now GTM is widely preferred.
lets see an example for tracking a specific task
Example 1: Analyzing the performance of a newly added template feature
let say, you are working on a Notes Application, which helps the user to Create and manage notes. Now you have enroll a new feature called “Template” which helps the user to create a note on a certain format. The template are created based on certain R&D and Now you wanted to analyze the performance of this feature.
To do that, we need to track three instances on the flow
Click of the “Add Note” button which indicates number of times the user attempted to create notes
Click of a“Template” link Number of times the template list is been viewed
Click of a Template list Number of times the template is been used
By comparing the clicks on each instances, we can analyze the overall performance of the feature and if any issues found it should be taken as critical bug and immediate action should be taken. We can also gather new ideas from the users for future improvements.
lets analyze the numbers
Only 13% of the people who have attempted to create the note have viewed the template list. The ratio seems to be too low, Hence, action needs to be take to improvise the figure. Here are the possible reason for the current low performance
User didn’t notice the Template Link itself, May be due to less affordability
User didn’t know how to use this feature
The following suggestion can be helpful to improvise the affordability and the user awareness about this feature.
keep a “New” tag next to the link, so that use will notice the feature and give it a try.
We can send a mailer communication detailing the feature and its usage
we can also enroll a “Take a tour” option to ensure every user notice the feature and learned how to use it
Secondly, the number of user who used the template is much lesser than people who have viewed the list. It it not even 10% of the click.
This might have happened for several reasons, may be the template labeling is not understandable for the users, or the template what they are looking for is not found.
Though this would little disappointment for the user right now, we can solve it only with proper research. We may have to add few more templates with appropriate labeling for which we should make due plans for user research.
With constant improvement we can tune in the product usability according to the user expectation.