Measuring User Experience
By Pamela and Steve Ellis
We've all seen the stats. Almost half of a site's visitors go elsewhere due to poor navigability, slow download times, or confusing content. If users have problems on your site, they jump to competitors en masse. Fortunately, there are several useful ways to evaluate user experience.
Setting Goals and Making It Pay
The concept of user experience can sometimes seem a little fuzzy, but it essentially consists of ensuring that the actual experiences of users on your site match the experiences you expect them to have. If your goal is to sell music online, you might be interested in whether people can find a particular title, listen to a sample, and then successfully make a purchase. Call these "critical tasks." Every application has at least one. If you haven't determined what your site's critical tasks are, there's no time like the present.
There are various ways to calculate the success of user experience improvements, including profit in savings, long-term customer value, or customer conversion. But the bottom line is this: You should be keenly interested in users who are unable to complete critical tasks on your site. All of your efforts should be directed toward reducing their numbers. However, there's a bit of voodoo surrounding how your efforts to this end translate into profits. For example, there's no one-to-one correlation between market research and determining site goals and critical tasks. But the one thing you can know and measure is whether someone can complete a task or not.
