What are significant UX KPIs for an enterprise product?

Question

Most KPI lists I have found (like Google's HEART/GSM model) assume a free user - one that can show up to use your product, and then choose to stay or go based on how pleasant the experience is, and how useful the tool is.

Obviously, enterprise UX is not like that. There's no bounce rate, or retention issues, if the employee is required to use the tool. And key tasks tend to be performed very quickly by users who have been trained thoroughly.

So what empiric indicators can I collect for an enterprise product, and improve upon with better UX?

Answer 1

task completion times, error rates, completion rates, subjective satisfaction using SEQ, perceived satisfaction of usability using SUS, if you can track mouse clicks, then you can test your IA using tree testing to see number of wrong clicks.

Above all, your team must define what their UX goals are - effectiveness, efficiency, accuracy, ease of discovery, success rates with frequent tasks

Answer 2

I think the main question you need to ask yourself is:

What does success look like to you?

• If success means happy users/customers you could look into net promoter score (NPS).
• If success means users completing tasks quickly, you could measure
  task completion time.
• If success means users encountering only a small amount of
  errors/bugs, you could track customer support tickets.

It really all depends on your goals.

Answer 3

Identifying Key Performance Indicators

If you have not been provided any KPIs to begin with, then you might start by identifying the pain points of the business you are dealing with — in other words, the reason this project has been started in the first place.

It might be that the business is spending more than they would like in support costs, or they are not yielding a certain number of results (sales, transactions, emails - whatever it is the business does)

If you start by identifying the top costs to the business, as quantitatively as possible, that gives you a starting line, and a budget.

---

Example

Let's take a really generic example:

Acme Company sells widgets, and the product you have been tasked to deliver is a sales tool for Reps to use out in the field.

The top pain points might be given to you as:

• Reps do not have the right information to hand at the right time, hindering their ability to sell
• Reps are dealing with tools that crash frequently
• There is a delay between when Reps make a sale, and the Business registers it, so that it's hard for the business to measure the effectiveness of Reps

---

Solutions

This could be translated into solutions:

• Let's build a product that gives Reps the information they need, when they need it
• Let's fix or replace the tools they use with more reliable ones
• Let's implement a new solution that gives the business real-time visibility over Reps performance

---

Key Performance Indicators

Success for these proposed solutions might look like:

• 10% increase in sales volume
• 100 fewer support calls per week
• 20% decrease in Rep overtime fees

With these KPIs in hand, you can quantify the projected value of your project (10% increase in sales volume equals $amount, support calls cost $amount each so 100 fewer per week should save $amount * 100 per week) and so on.

Hope that is helpful to you. The bottom line is that KPIs are specific to the business and the project. They are the metrics that you select in order to define success, typically provided by the business or stakeholder.

Answer 4

I think you can keep from this method (the HEART framework) some metrics that can be applied to an employee:

• Happiness;

• Task efficiency;

In my opinion, in this case, better results can be obtained if the employee is required to use at least two similar tools (maybe the old tool used and the new one). In this case, you can measure engagement, adoption and retention.

In Measuring the User Experience on a Large Scale: User-Centered Metrics for Web Applications, by Kerry Rodden, Hilary Hutchinson, and Xin Fu from Google, you can see you can use this framework for an enterprise, with some observation.

For example, Engagement may not be meaningful in an enterprise context, if users are expected to use the product as part of their work. In this case, a team may choose to focus more on Happiness or Task Success. But it may still be meaningful to consider Engagement at a feature level, rather than the overall product level.

Answer 5

The Critical Success Factors (CSF) are Reducing expenditure on Trainings, Maintenance, Manuals, Extra Staff, Support.