Measuring User experience

Everyone thinks experience is important. After all, the argument goes, the ultimate reason for using any service is to experience something, whether that’s a sense of wonder and excitement when you discover something new, enjoyment at some particularly interesting writing or, more prosaically, a sense of relief at paying an overdue bill.

Measuring experience is difficult, as is proving you can design something that creates a good experience. You can ask users to rate your design, but you’ve got to get them at the right point and then interpret what they say (or do).

We can however agree on a few basic, fundamental elements of a good web experience. For example, pages should load quickly is going to be on anyone’s list. There’s lots of cold, hard evidence that users won’t even bother with your experience if you can’t serve a page quickly.

Similarly, slapping a huge popover on a page makes for a rubbish experience, while making links easy to click helps too.

We could term these the hygiene factors of a good web experience, and we can measure them pretty objectively. Your server responds within a certain amount of time, your page weighs in at less than a 150kb while you make sure there’s plenty of padding and negative spacing around link list items on a mobile phone. We don’t even need user feedback to get an idea of how well we’re doing these things – Google will measure them for us with and provide a score out of 100.

Now, this website’s pretty simple, so my scores are relatively easy to boost:

I thought it’d be interesting to compare how some startups within the region measure User Experience, especially those within the Fintech, Productivity and Tech Enabling niches who boast some form of UX design: