While AB Testing allows you to quickly measure the impact of a design choice, user research, often qualitative, seems more difficult to quantify. However, its benefits are very real: cost reduction, improvement of the user experience and long-term loyalty.

In this article, discover why integrating a user-centric approach is essential, how to measure its impact through suitable KPIs and how it lays the foundations for tomorrow's standards.

Photo Vitaly Gariev / Unsplash

It is difficult to calculate the ROI of user research because its effects are rarely direct or immediate, especially when we are talking about qualitative research with methods like interviews, tests, workshops, etc.

During an AB Test, on the other hand, we will have precise KPIs to compare between version A and version B, there is a direct impact of the design choice made.

However, the interest of a qualitative approach can be demonstrated and sometimes measured.

A clear reduction in costs

Despite the investment that user research represents, it will firstly allow costs to be reduced:

• Related to development efforts on features that are not liked, interactions that are not understood, etc., and which will be quickly changed. We will develop a version that is already tested and proven.
• Related to blockers for users that will not have been detected before going into production and which will lead, for example, to cart abandonment and represent a loss of revenue.
• Related to fixing any usability issues that emerge after going live. It is cheaper to change an idea or prototype than it is to change a live site or app in production.
• Linked to the impact of all these irritants and blockers on the reputation of interfaces and user loyalty. 

While not all of these costs can be easily estimated, when applying recommendations to a prototype, one can know what these changes would have represented if they had to be made to an online product.

Classic KPIs

We can assume that a better user experience leads to an increase in the conversion rate, but to know this we would also need to be able to – in the same way as an AB test – test the performance of a version developed without user research and compare. 

Obviously we can't do that, but we can compare a new version to its previous iteration on any KPI that seems relevant to us: 

• Conversion rate, retention rate, average basket, etc.,
• More precise KPIs on interface elements: exposure rate, click rate, etc.,
• More UX-oriented KPIs: NPS, SUS-type usability questionnaire, etc.

However, you have to choose your KPIs carefully and a higher click rate on an element on the screen is not necessarily a positive, you have to think qualitatively: do all users who need to click on the element during the journey actually do so? Do users for whom the element is not relevant understand it well and avoid clicking?

Indirect and long-term benefits

When using KPIs, particularly conversion rate, we must also keep in mind that putting the user at the center is not always aligned with short-term business interests, i.e. converting the user here and now.

For example, removing a dark pattern – an element designed to manipulate the user, such as a big flashing red countdown on a product page – may lead to a decrease in conversion rate in the short term, but because it improves trust or the perceived quality of the interface, we may, for example, see better retention in the long term. 

As said above, most often we will not be able to attribute this KPI to the elimination of the dark pattern directly, the user experience is holistic.

Generally speaking, a good user experience is the sum of multiple design decisions, a set of actions and interactions that will not always have evolved at the same time. A given design improvement in the whole of a redesign cannot be measured by a precise numerical increase in KPIs, because we cannot extract a small part of a whole, but it contributes to an overall experience that must be qualitative to convert and retain.

A quality standard

The UX of digital interfaces has improved enormously in recent years. Some usability issues that were common in the past have been almost eliminated today: standards such as automatic validation of input fields and the existence of precise error messages have not always existed, and it is no longer possible to ignore them. Investing in UX and user research not only allows you to avoid being left behind on current best practices but also to have the opportunity to be a forerunner on tomorrow's standards.

Include your own users

With all the resources available, sometimes for free, online, it can also be tempting not to do UX or user research in-house. We could follow existing best practices. This is not ideal for two main reasons:

• A real watch, with a benchmark and the selection of good practices coming from quality sources and relevant to our project is already a job for UX and UI professionals and should integrate them,
• Knowing a good practice does not mean that we will know how to implement it for our project and our users. Monitoring alone does not allow us to prioritize and arbitrate. Our implementation of the good practice with our graphic charter, in interaction with the rest of the interface will be unique and it remains necessary to test it.

Take Away

• Ignoring a user-centric approach is costly: time, resources, customer retention, etc.
• Savings on resources during design, from initial ideas to production, are immediate,
• The benefits on the final product are qualitative and long-term through the creation of a relationship of trust with our users and promises kept on quality,
• However, we can follow classic KPIs, conversion rates, engagement rates, NPS, etc. between several versions of the product, with nuance.

 

 

Marie Euzen, UX Researcher/Designer at UX-Republic