When you are looking at user experience, you might wonder how you can truly measure and what metrics you should be looking at. Optimising your website for the quality of the user experience is vital to the success of any website on the internet today. But, what should you look out for?Â
According to Google, there are three core needs that should be met, namely, loading, interactivity, and visual stability, but what are the rest you should look at? When you are looking at the user experience of your website there are some metrics you will need to take into account. Below we take a deeper look into some of the top metrics for measuring user experience.Â
Largest Contentful Paint
Largest Contentful Paint might sound like a bit of a mouthful, but it can be understood in simple terms. This metric measures the load speed of the page and marks the point in this page load time where the main content is likely to be loaded. If the most important content loads quickly and loads first, then the user experience is likely to be positive.Â
You can use tools such as the Chrome UX Report, the Core Web Vitals Extension, and Chrome Dev Tools to monitor this speed. Performing a site audit can also tell you how quickly a page loads and which content loads first. This metric is important and should be monitored regularly, in order to maintain a quick load speed for your website.Â
Consumer Behaviour
Another important metric for measuring user experience is to look at the behaviour of the consumers or browsers who visit your website. This might sound nearly impossible to measure, but you can use analytical tools to monitor behaviour and make decisions about your website, its structure, and its user friendliness.Â
The consumer behaviour you should be monitoring includes the abandonment rate, the pageviews of specific and general pages, and how long they spend or how long it takes for a task to be completed. You can test task time by asking your employees to practice checking out items and time this; if it takes longer than three to five minutes for a simple task, you might have to look at improving functionalities.Â
Interactivity
Interactivity, or in Google’s words, “First Input Delay†is a user experience metric which measures responsiveness and the experience that users have when trying to interact with the page or website. If your page is difficult to interact with, or if it takes a long time for the page to load and become interactive, a user might click away to another page or website.Â
To monitor the responsiveness of your website, you can use Google’s tool on the Search Console and you can ask your team to try and use the website on their mobile devices. Interactivity and a positive user experience also relies on the page load speed, so be sure to optimise all images and text for this. This will help to improve the interactivity levels and rankings of your website.Â
Customer SatisfactionÂ
User experience has a direct effect on customer satisfaction, which makes customer satisfaction an important metric to measure. It can be difficult to measure this but you can do so by sending out surveys to people after they have used your website or bought a product. The scoring system should be easy to understand for both your UX designer and your consumers.Â
For example, you could ask consumers to score their user experience of your website on a scale of one to ten. Those who score a six and under are usually unsatisfied with their experience while those who score seven and above are happy with their experience. Doing this type of survey at regular intervals can help you to make improvements on customer satisfaction elements.Â
Visual Stability
Have you ever been reading an article on a website, and all of a sudden something on the page changes? This is known as visual stability or, in more technical terms, Cumulative Layout Shift. It is an important user experience metric because it monitors how often users experience changes in the layout of a webpage.Â
A low CLS ensures that the user experience of all pages is positive and visually stable. While the experience can become annoying for the user, visual instability might be caused by other underlying issues with your website, such as out-of-date plugins, a font that is not rendering correctly, or a video or image that is too large for the page which is failing to load. Fixing these issues can help to improve the visual stability and user experience of your website.Â
Up The User Experience Ante
Measuring user experience cna help you to make significant improvements to your website and boost consumer engagement with your brand. Be sure to look at where the main content is likely to be loaded during load speed to optimise this element, watch consumer behaviour and adapt accordingly, and remember to maintain visual stability for every page.Â
If you would like a professionally designed and well-thought out website for your company, feel free to contact NetMechanic today to find out how we can help you.Â
