There’s no reason you couldn’t compare against several of these reference points. When you take your first benchmarking metrics (often called the baseline), you won’t have data from earlier versions to compare against, so it’s good to compare against a competitor or industry standard at that point. Our eight-week retention rate is 8%, but we’re aiming for at least 15%. The average ease-of-use rating for that task in a study of the top 6 hotel websites was 6.5/7. The average ease-of-use rating for creating an account on our hotel’s website is 5.3/7. Our success rate for application completion is 86%, while our competitor’s is 62%. After our recent redesign, the average time to make a purchase is now 43 seconds. In 2019, the average time to make a purchase was 58 seconds. With benchmarking, you can compare your UX metrics against four different possible reference points.Īn earlier version of the product or service A single number is meaningless, since you have no idea whether it’s good or bad. Once you have those numbers, you have to compare them to something. You can also use customer-service data (for example, the number of support emails about a specific task). You can collect those UX metrics using potentially any quantitative methodology, but analytics, surveys, and quantitative usability testing are the three methods that often work best for benchmarking. Eight-week retention rate for an app (percentage of users continuing to use the app after eight weeks).Average ease-of-use rating for creating an account.Success rate for an application completion.For example, we might collect any of the following UX metrics: We refer to benchmarking as a practice because, ideally, once you begin benchmarking, you can track your progress over time, again and again, redesign through redesign - it’s an ongoing process.Įssentially, benchmarking involves collecting quantitative data that describes the experience. UX benchmarking refers to evaluating a product or service’s user experience by using metrics to gauge its relative performance against a meaningful standard.

But better compared to what? Establishing a UX benchmarking practice is a great way to make sure you’re moving in the right direction and that you have a clear reference point for any improvements. We want to make the experience better (faster, easier, or more enjoyable). A redesign is usually intended to produce a change in the user experience.

Benchmark audio