Unlocking User Insights: Knowing User Actions on Your Website with Usability Testing

Have you ever spent countless hours on a product or feature only to discover that users aren’t doing everything you expected them to do? You were excited about your product launch, but it didn’t turn out the way you thought it would. Instead, you discover that your user base is shrinking. So, what’s the issue here? 

The answer lies in usability metrics.

What are usability metrics?

Usability metrics are specific measurements and statistics used to review a product’s usability. They can track how users can quickly complete specific tasks, how often they make mistakes, and their overall satisfaction when using the platform. By looking at the various usability metrics, you’ll have a good idea of the user’s experience and understand your product’s overall usability.

Different usability testing methods offer different metrics. Determining the right metrics to track is crucial in creating your usability testing plan, as you’ll want to tailor tests to provide the right user insights.

Why is it important to measure usability metrics?

The biggest benefit of conducting usability testing is that you’ll build scalable products with a shorter learning curve, which leads to satisfied users. This benefit will be more easily tapped into when tracking usability metrics as these are the backbone of your decision-making process.

Remember that surveys and interviews can provide valuable quantitative insights but won’t offer general stats or show the exact number of how users interact with your product’s UI.

Why should you consider usability testing?

Now that you know more about usability metrics, let’s examine the two reasons why you should conduct a usability test.

Getting past the aesthetic-usability effect

Conducting usability and other types of user testing will reduce the risk of test participants falling only for a website’s aesthetics, also known as the Aesthetic-Usability bias. This cognitive bias occurs when users perceive aesthetically pleasing designs as more functional. 

Relying on specific usability metrics will ensure that you have an objective approach to designing your platforms instead of relying on what may be subjective understandings of what users think they like.

Look for user-facing issues

When you are deep in a project, you can easily lose track of the bigger picture, the ultimate goal of creating a user-centric product. When tracking usability metrics, you can look for pain points or areas of improvement within the user experience (UX).

For example, if many users cannot make a purchase, it may be due to your product’s design or navigation that must be adjusted to improve the checkout process. Identifying these issues early can help your team focus on making data-backed decisions to create a better product.

5 Key usability metrics you should use

When determining which usability metrics to track, start by examining your project objectives and considering the metrics that will best inform these goals. Remember to measure against your platform’s specific goals and the benchmarks you want to optimize for the metrics that matter most for your users.

1. Completion rate

The completion rate, also known as the success rate, lets you access the percentage of users who navigate your product intuitively. Task completion is usually presented as a binary value of ‘1’ when users successfully completed the task and ‘0’ if they didn’t.

The completion rate metric helps validate whether your product’s main objective was met and whether users find it easy to follow the specific path. You can use this user data to modify the app, which adds value and provides an advantage over competitors.

2. Time on screen

Time on screen measures how long a user spends on a specific screen. If a user spends a considerable amount of time on screen, it indicates that they can’t find what they are looking for (except for blog posts or pages that include readable content where users will spend more time). If you review the users’ time on screen and metrics like misclick rate, you can easily find issues interfering with the UI, labels, or the page’s layout.

3. Time on task

This metric measures the duration users take to complete one task; if users take too long to complete a task, it may indicate that they can’t find what they’re looking for or are lost during the process.

Note that time on task is not a metric you should review on its own as you must contextualize the result and figure out why it’s taking users a long time to complete a task. You’ll need to know if users are taking longer than expected on something due to the website’s design, copy, instructions, or information architecture.

4. Misclick rate

The misclick rate is the average number of misclicks outside your product’s main clickable areas. This usually happens because users don’t find your platform intuitive or expect it to act like other websites.

Based on Jakob’s Law, users spend a lot of their time on other websites. Therefore, they expect yours to work like the ones they’re familiar with. If it doesn’t, this may lead to usability issues. You can calculate your misclick rate with a detailed click heatmap to find where exactly your users are clicking and adjust your design based on it.

5. Number of errors

This self-explanatory metric calculates the number of errors your participant makes when trying to complete a task. This may include errors made when performing a task, including accidental actions or oversights. The higher the error rate, the harder it is for users to complete a task on your product.

For example, users can’t register on the platform due to strict password requirements – if users can’t come up with a good password, they’ll likely try out different combinations until they succeed or give up. A high error rate may indicate that you must disclose the number of letters, numbers, and characters the password must contain.

Conclusion – metrics matter

When searching for user insights, it’s easy to forget to plan to look for usability metrics – after all, you’ll still be gathering data, right?

However, if you want to maximize your insights, it is well worth the time to consider the types of metrics that best suit your product and answer your research questions.

After pinpointing this, you can design your usability test around these metrics and begin gathering data that provides a complete understanding of the usability of your product.