Turning UX into hard metrics

The importance of the User Experience (UX) is increasingly recognized for the crucial role it has to play in take-up and loyalty of devices & digital services. The consumer devotion to their product eco-system of choice, the way in which users are encouraged to explore and discover new service facets, the ease with which it is possible to execute the actions you want quickly and easily; all these are core drivers of adoption and loyalty driven by the User Experience.

This has not always been the case, with UX historically being considered a discipline that is often separate from overall marketing prerogatives; a stage undertaken as something of a hygiene factor to ensure ‘all is well’ before getting on with the ‘more important parts’ of the marketing cycle.

The emergence of the central role for UX is clearly to be applauded by those of us who always considered that the User Experience is, after all, what consumers are buying so we had better get it right! However, this move has brought with it expectations for hard data to support decisions about the product form factor or user interface. After all, if tough decisions about the User Experience have to be made then it is perhaps not unreasonable to demand hard metrics to assist in the decision making. Historically this has been a problem for UX as the discipline has to date been largely qualitative in nature and generally not provided hard metrics into the business.