A practical guide on how to use UX benchmarking, SUS, SUPR-Q, UMUX-LITE, CES to eliminate bias and gather statistically reliable results — with useful templates and resources. By Roman Videnov.
Measuring UX is mostly about showing cause and effect. Of course, management wants to do more of what has already worked — and it typically wants to see ROI > 5%. But the return is more than just increased revenue. It’s also reduced costs, expenses and mitigated risk. And UX is an incredibly affordable yet impactful way to achieve it.
Good design decisions are intentional. They aren’t guesses or personal preferences. They are deliberate and measurable. Over the last years, I’ve been setting ups design KPIs in teams to inform and guide UX decisions (fully explained in videos → https://measure-ux.com).
Here are some examples:
1. Top tasks success > 80% (for critical tasks)
2. Time to complete top tasks < Xs (for critical tasks)
3. Time to first success < 90s (for onboarding)
4. Time to candidates < 120s (nav + filtering in eCommerce)
5. Time to top candidate < 120s (for feature comparison)
6. Time to hit the limit of a free tier < 7d (for upgrades)
7. Presets/templates usage > 80% per user (to boost efficiency)
8. Filters used per session > 5 per user (quality of filtering)
9. Feature adoption rate > 30% (usage of a new feature per user)
10. Feature retention rate > 40% (after 90 days)
11. Time to pricing quote < 2 weeks (for B2B)
12. Application processing time < 2 weeks (online banking)
13. Default settings correction < 10% (quality of defaults)
14. Relevance of top 100 search requests > 80% (for top 5 results)
15. Service desk inquiries < 35/week (poor design → more inquiries)
16. Form input accuracy ≈ 100% (user input in forms)
17. Frequency of errors < 3/visit (mistaps, double-clicks)
18. Password recovery frequency < 5% per user (for auth)
19. Fake email addresses < 5% (newsletters)
20. Helpdesk follow-up rate < 4% (quality of service desk replies)
21. “Turn-around” score < 1 week (frustrated users -> happy users)
22. Environmental impact < 0.3g/page request (sustainability)
23. Frustration score < 10% (AUS + SUS/SUPR-Q)
24. System Usability Scale > 75 (usability)
25. Accessible Usability Scale (AUS) > 75 (accessibility)
26. Core Web Vitals ≈ 100% (performance)
More details → https://measure-ux.com
Each team works with 3–4 design KPIs that reflect the impact of their work. Search team works with search quality score, onboarding team works with time to success, authentication team works with password recovery rate.
What gets measured, gets better. And it gives you the data you need to monitor and visualize the impact of your UX work. Once it becomes a second nature of your process, not only will you have an easier time for getting buy-in, but also build enough trust to boost UX in a company with low UX maturity.