UX success metrics

You know your UX research makes a difference. But when stakeholders ask "what's the ROI?" or "how do we know this works?" – that's when things get tricky. The secret isn't measuring everything you possibly can. It's about measuring the right things, the metrics that actually matter to your business.

We recently teamed up with User Interviews to host a webinar with Kirk Doggett, SVP of UX Research at Citizens Bank, and Joe Formica, Design Advocate at Lyssna, exploring how to choose and use success metrics effectively. What became clear is that measuring UX impact isn't about tracking everything – it's about tracking what truly matters.

Whether you're a researcher trying to demonstrate ROI, a designer looking to validate your decisions with data, or a product manager seeking to make informed choices, this guide will help you navigate the world of UX metrics with confidence.

Check out the webinar on-demand.

Before you start measuring UX metrics

The temptation when you first start thinking about metrics is to measure everything. But Kirk and Joe both emphasized that successful metrics work starts long before you open your analytics dashboard.

Understand what matters to your business

"You want to consider what matters to the business or to your stakeholders," Kirk explains. The key is finding where business goals and customer goals intersect. That's your sweet spot – where improving the user experience directly impacts business outcomes.

For Citizens Bank, this might mean measuring chatbot effectiveness by tracking how many customer questions get resolved without escalating to a phone call. For an ecommerce company, it might be measuring how quickly users can complete checkout.

The specific metrics will vary, but the principle remains: focus on the intersection of user needs and business value.

Make sure your UX metrics are feasible

Before committing to any metric, Joe recommends asking yourself a critical question: Is this actually feasible to measure?

"Sometimes it looks good on paper, but then you have aspects of your team and added work – maybe things like connections between analytics, products, or things that need to be added in to make it happen," Joe notes.

Consider these feasibility factors:

• Budget: Do you have funds for tools, participants, or external help?

• Time: Does your timeline allow for proper measurement?

• Sample size: Will you have enough users/data for meaningful results?

• Technical setup: Can you actually track what you need to track?

Joe's advice for resource-constrained teams? Get scrappy. Work with what you have and find creative ways to demonstrate value without needing big budgets.

Before you commit to measuring any metric, run through this feasibility checklist. If you can't answer "yes" to most of these questions, you may need to adjust your approach or choose a different metric:

Get everyone on board

Perhaps the most critical piece of prework is creating alignment across your team and stakeholders.

"You want to make sure that everyone is not only on board with the metric you’re choosing and the way you're measuring it, but with the actual goal," Joe emphasizes.

Kirk's team at Citizens uses a one-page plan framework (originally developed by Tomer Sharon, author of It's Our Research) to create this alignment upfront. This document includes research questions, learning goals, methods, and metrics – and it becomes the template for reporting results.

"It also helps to manage scope creep, where sometimes during the course of a research project, the stakeholders say, 'oh, what about this? Can we ask this? Can we ask that?'" Kirk explains.

Want a systematic approach to metrics planning?

Our free UX Success Metrics Template includes this feasibility checklist plus decision trees, tracking databases, and report builders. Duplicate it to plan your research with confidence. 

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How to choose the right UX success metric

Once you've done your prework, it's time to select the metrics that will actually inform your decisions.

The "it depends" reality

"It depends on what tools you have available to measure," Kirk explains. "Not every team, not every researcher has access to things like Adobe Analytics or Google Analytics or different survey tools. So I think you want to consider what you're able to measure. That's a big factor in determining how you want to approach it."

There's no universal playbook. The key is matching your metric to:

• Your research question: What specifically are you trying to learn?

• Your product stage: Are you in early concept testing or optimizing a mature product?

• Your audience: Who are you designing for and what matters to them?

• Your business model: How does your company make money or create value?

Qualitative and quantitative: Better together

Both Kirk and Joe emphasized the importance of using qualitative and quantitative data together.

Quantitative data tells you what is happening. Qualitative data tells you why it's happening.

When Kirk's team does preference testing, they don't just rely on which design wins.

"We also ask another follow-up question as to why you chose that. And sometimes the comments, the qualitative comments that we get are equally, if not more informative than the numbers themselves."

Avoid vanity metrics

One of the most important skills in choosing metrics is recognizing vanity metrics – measurements that look impressive but don't actually help you make better decisions.

Kirk identifies several common vanity metrics:

• Page views: Can be influenced by email campaigns, social media, or bots.

• Time on site: Might indicate confusion rather than engagement.

• Social media followers: Doesn't correlate with business outcomes.

• App downloads: Means nothing if users don't activate or engage.

"It's easy to measure them, but if it doesn't actually result in any change in your business, it's not really adding any value to know those numbers," Kirk points out.

Joe goes even further: "At best, you're not taking action on them. At worst, you're making design decisions based on them."

Instead of vanity metrics, focus on actionable metrics that connect directly to business value:

• Conversion rate instead of page views.

• Task completion rate instead of time on site.

• Customer lifetime value instead of follower count.

• Activation rate instead of downloads.

Not sure if you're tracking a vanity metric? Use this quick reference to identify measurements that waste time and find better alternatives that drive decisions:

Real-world UX metrics examples

Theory is valuable, but nothing beats seeing metrics in action. Here are two examples that show what happens when you measure the right things – and what happens when you don't.

Joe's wedding planning platform

Joe shared a case where conventional wisdom about metrics led them astray. He worked on a wedding planning platform that helped couples organize their events. The onboarding process created a personalized planning board with key dates, to-dos, and project management tools.

The client wanted to optimize onboarding for speed, getting it down to under a minute.

Joe tested the opposite: a comprehensive onboarding with tons of questions that took 10+ minutes.

"I wanted to get out of timing it and more into a metric that I thought mattered, which was their confidence level," Joe explains.

The results were unanimous. Users weren't confident with the quick onboarding: "Yeah, this looks nice, but I'm Greek Orthodox, and that's a huge part of my wedding. It didn't ask me anything about that."

With the longer onboarding, people were "actually having fun answering these questions" and felt highly confident the tool would help them.

The business impact: Drop-off rates were similar, but the longer onboarding led to dramatically higher conversion from free trial to paid accounts.

The lesson: "Remember what the goal is here," Joe emphasizes. Don't measure how fast users complete onboarding (output) – measure how confident they feel in the tool's usefulness (outcome). Outcomes predict business success; outputs might not.

Citizens Bank's mobile deposits

Kirk's team at Citizens tackled a common banking challenge: making mobile check deposits more user-friendly. The goal was to improve the usability of the feature that lets customers deposit checks using their phone's camera.

They used prototypes to test design improvements, measuring both UX and business metrics:

• Error rate: Reduced by one-third

• Net Promoter Score: Increased by almost 5 points

• Deposit success rate: Improved significantly

"Those are all solid business metrics," Kirk notes.

The lesson: This case shows the power of using multiple metric types and connecting UX improvements to business outcomes. When you improve usability (fewer errors) and see corresponding improvements in satisfaction (higher NPS), you can make a compelling case for the business value of UX work.

Common UX metrics pitfalls and how to avoid them

Even experienced researchers fall into metric traps. Here are the most common pitfalls and how to sidestep them.

Over-measuring and over-complicating

Joe warns against creating complex formulas combining multiple metrics: "Combining too many metrics can lead to compounding error, confusion, bad decisions, and you lose sight of what you're actually trying to learn."

The fix: "Pick the most direct measure of success," Joe advises. "Work backwards from that."

In other words, keep your metrics simple, direct, and clear.

Measuring the wrong things

Joe's diagnostic question is powerful: "Are we using this? Are we basing design decisions off of this? Are we prioritizing our next sprint off of this?"

If the answer is no, you're tracking a vanity metric.

The fix: Work backwards from decisions you need to make. Ask yourself:

• What decision will this metric inform?

• Who will act on this information?

• What would we do differently based on different results?

Falling for easy numbers

Kirk warns against measuring something just because it's easy to measure: "Big numbers can sound impressive, but they may not be relevant to business value."

The fix: Start with what matters, then figure out how to measure it – not the other way around.

UX success metrics best practices

Once you know what to avoid, here's what to do instead. These practices will help you build a metrics program that drives real impact.

Start with "why"

Before choosing any metric, understand the business context and stakeholder priorities.

Kirk emphasizes the importance of considering what matters to the business or to your stakeholders from the start. "Things like completion rates or engagement," he explains, giving the example of measuring chatbot effectiveness by tracking "how many questions we can answer within the chatbot without having people needing to call the call center."

The key is thinking about "the business goals and the customer goals and where they intersect. That's really the sweet spot, and that will address both the user needs and the business needs."

Communicate in stakeholder language

Speak about metrics in terms that resonate with stakeholders:

• For a VP of marketing: Frame metrics around acquisition, engagement, and retention.

• For a product manager: Focus on feature adoption and user satisfaction.

• For an executive: Connect to revenue, cost savings, or competitive advantage.

• For engineering: Emphasize efficiency and error reduction.

Kirk provides a concrete example from Vistaprint: "The user research team was a revenue center because we were able to measure through A/B testing the difference in revenue that we were able to make. We'd do research, design, and then we were able to run new designs against the current designs, and we could measure how much money we made. And it was millions of dollars a quarter."

That's speaking stakeholder language – connecting UX research directly to revenue impact.

Combine quick wins with long-term measurement

Use quick, unmoderated methods (preference tests, first click tests, five second tests) to:

• Answer tactical questions quickly.

• Build momentum and demonstrate value.

• Iterate rapidly on designs.

Use longer-term methods (A/B tests, benchmark scores, periodic usability testing) to:

• Track progress over time.

• Measure business impact.

• Make the case for continued investment in UX.

You don't need to choose between speed and rigor. The most effective metrics programs use both approaches strategically:

Build institutional knowledge

Kirk's team maintains a metrics menu – a curated list of methods and measurements they commonly use, organized by research question type. This institutional knowledge becomes increasingly valuable over time as you document which metrics work well for different scenarios.

Key takeaways

Measuring UX success isn't about tracking everything – it's about tracking what matters. The most effective metrics programs:

• Start with alignment. Make sure stakeholders agree on what matters and why before you begin measuring.

• Avoid vanity metrics. Focus on actionable metrics that directly relate to user success and business outcomes.

• Speak stakeholder language. Communicate metrics in terms stakeholders understand and care about.

• Measure outcomes, not just outputs. Joe's wedding planning example perfectly illustrates this: confidence in the tool's usefulness predicted business success better than onboarding speed.

• Balance quick wins with rigorous measurement. Use fast methods to maintain momentum while building toward longer-term measurements that demonstrate business impact.

• Iterate and improve. Your first metrics won't be perfect, and that's okay. Start with direct measures of what matters, learn from what works, and continuously refine your approach.

Remember Kirk's insight about the intersection of business goals and customer goals – that's your sweet spot. When you measure things that matter to both your users and your business, you create a compelling case for continued investment in UX while genuinely improving the experiences you create.

Start small if you need to. Pick one meaningful metric for your next project. Use Joe's feasibility framework to make sure you can actually measure it. Get stakeholder buy-in on why it matters. Then measure it, learn from it, and share what you discover in language your stakeholders understand.

The metrics that matter are out there – now you have the framework to find them.

Ready to start measuring what matters? Our UX Success Metrics Template gives you a complete workspace to plan your research, select the right metrics, and prove impact to stakeholders. Use built-in decision trees to choose from 30+ metrics, track results in pre-formatted tables, and generate reports that communicate ROI—all in one customizable template.

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Diane Leyman

Senior Content Marketing Manager

Diane Leyman is the Senior Content Marketing Manager at Lyssna. She brings extensive experience in content strategy and management within the SaaS industry, along with editorial and content roles in publishing and the not-for-profit sector