Since starting this newsletter, I've written about the value of an experience measurement program and how getting buy-in can help you deliver that value. But what does a great experience measurement program actually look like? In other words, what differentiates a program that drives business impact from one that just collects data? In my experience, there are four key factors:
A Flexible Framework
Experience data is messy. Humans are diverse and unpredictable, and measures of our feelings, opinions, and behaviors can be equally so. I've found that a clear framework is the best way to wrangle this messy data into meaningful metrics.
A framework should connect metrics to a set of principles that collectively define a high-quality user experience (Google's HEART framework is a great example). A solid framework creates standardization, allowing you to compare experiences across diverse products or user types. It also provides the flexibility you need when dealing with messy data. For example, an experience principle like "delight" may relate to very different metrics for B2C users versus B2B users.
A Hero Metric
A framework is essential, but frameworks can be complex. When your framework feels like an academic exercise to senior leaders, it can be the kiss of death for your program's adoption. (Trust me, I've learned this the hard way!)
Defining a single "hero" metric for the company to rally around will help you get buy-in. This metric should be easy to understand and robust enough to sit side-by-side with financial metrics in an OKR review. (Side note: I typically favor survey scores for hero metrics. They're easy to scale and sensitive enough to move alongside changes to your product).
Explainability
Your metrics also need to be readily explainable. In other words, it should be easy to understand why the metric went up or down. If stakeholders can't understand your metrics, then they have no way to influence them—and your program loses its ability to improve the user experience.
An experience framework helps create explainability by connecting metrics to specific levers that teams can pull to improve the user experience. For example, if you know a metric like usability is driven by app performance, you can correlate declines in usability with factors like page load time—something your stakeholders can tackle on their roadmap.
Closing the Loop
At the end of the day, experience measurement exists to improve the user experience. An effective program doesn't just identify gaps in the experience; it helps systematically fix them. But, the user experience problems that programs like mine uncover are often complex and require cross-functional collaboration across multiple organizations to tackle. Fixing problems like this takes two approaches:
Demonstrating the ROI of fixing them
Creating accountability to fix them
A robust experience measurement program can do both. We can link user experience issues to a dollar value and build the reporting and accountability mechanisms to ensure they get fixed.
The Bottom Line
Easy, right? Well, not really. But definitely worthwhile. With these four ingredients (plus a pinch of time and lots of buy in), an experience measurement program can become a powerful driver of business value.
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