UX Metrics: Identify Trackable Footprints and Avoid the Woozles
Out-of-the-box metrics themselves are only observations. They don’t have a story that helps us understand if a better design should increase them or decrease them. Without the story, we don’t know what to do differently.
shoppers were jumping back and forth, between product and gallery page (that’s what we call a category page, because it’s often a gallery of products). The shoppers were eliminating one product, then the next, until they found the one they wanted. We gave that up-and-down motion, between product and gallery pages, the name “pogosticking.”
66% of all purchases happened with the shopper visiting a single product page. Of the shoppers who visited more than one product page, the more pages they visited, the less likely they were to purchase at all.
Hunting the product comparison Woozle wouldn’t work. Increasing the detail on the product description or implementing virtual models wasn’t what would increase the retailer’s sales. Improving the gallery pages would.
One great thing about pogosticking is it gives us a very clear set of footprints to track. We can classify which pages are product pages and which are gallery pages. Then we can look for instances where users jump between them
Using clear footprints as UX metrics we track gives us a way to tell when our designs are working well and when they could use improvement.
we observed that knowing the shipping costs could increase sales. We can see if the easy-to-track footprint of people who stop shopping at the payment information page changes when we move shipping information to a better place in the checkout flow. If we think shipping cost calculation is a major cause, this number should go down when we make it easier to discover.
The best UX metrics we’ve ever found have all come from observing users. We see the users do something and ask “How often does that happen in real life?”
When we’ve just drawn inferences from analytics, we end up chasing Woozles and getting nowhere. By starting with user observations and identifying footprints to build our UX metrics, we create powerful tools for measuring how our designs work.
Posted on August 8, 2019