Introduction - Measuring the User Experience: Collecting, Analyzing, and Presenting Usability Metrics - page 1

CHAPTER 1
Introduction

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CONTENTS
1.1 WHAT IS USER EXPERIENCE

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1.2 WHAT ARE USER EXPERIENCE METRICS? 6

1.3 THE VALUE OF UX METRICS 8

1.4 METRICS FOR EVERYONE 9

1.5 NEW TECHNOLOGIES IN UX METRICS 10

1.6 TEN MYTHS ABOUT UX METRICS 11

Myth 1: Metrics Take Too Much Time to Collect 11

Myth 2: UX Metrics Cost Too Much Money 12

Myth 3: UX Metrics are not Useful When Focusing on Small Improvements 12

Myth 4: UX Metrics Don't Help us Understand Causes 12

Myth 5: UX Metrics are Too Noisy 12

Myth 6: You Can Just Trust Your Gut 13

Myth 7: Metrics Don't Apply to New Products 13

Myth 8: No Metrics Exist for the Type of Issues We are Dealing with 13

Myth 9: Metrics are not Understood or Appreciated by Management 14

Myth 10: It's Difficult to Collect Reliable Data with a Small Sample Size 14

The goal of this topic is to show how user experience (UX) metrics can be a pow-
erful tool for evaluating and improving the design of any product. When some
people think about user experience metrics, they feel overwhelmed by compli-
cated formulas, contradictory research, and advanced statistical methods. We
hope to demystify much of the research and focus on the practical application
of UX metrics. We'll walk you through a step-by-step approach to collecting,
analyzing, and presenting UX metrics. We'll help you choose the right metrics
for each situation or application and show you how to use them to produce reli-
able, actionable results without breaking your budget. We will introduce some
new UX metrics that you might want to consider adding to your toolkit. We'll
give you guidelines and tips for analyzing a wide range of metrics and provide
many different examples of how to present UX metrics to others in simple and
effective ways.