What are the best statistics for a UX Team to collect about its product?


There is a great paper on UX metrics by Kerry Rodden and Hillary Hutchinson, who are UX Researchers at Google.

Measuring the User Experience on a Large Scale:
User-Centered Metrics for Web Applications
http://www.google.com/research/p...

It's an academic paper, so it's a little dry, but well worth the read.  Here's a quick summary:

Teams should focus on metrics that indicate:

  • Happiness - Often measured through a long-running survey that includes a  Net Promoter Score ®.
  • Engagement - Visits per user per week. Or posts per user. In Gmail, we carefully watch a metric we call "5 of 7". It's the percentage of users that visit the product at least 5 out of 7 days a week. (This metric turns out to be predicative long term retention)
  • Adoption - Measured as daily active users (DAUs). Or commonly at Google: 7-day-actives, which is the number of unique users who have used the product once in the last week.
  • Retention - There are many ways to measure this. I like looking at the percentage of 7-day-actives who are still 7-day-actives a week later, a month later, and 3 months later.
  • Task success - This can be measured by looking at abandonment rates in any task, or looking at time-to-completion of key tasks. For example: on Quora, you may measure how long it takes to answer a question, and how many people start to answer, but do not finish.

The paper goes into much more detail about "... articulating the goals of a product or feature, then identifying signals that indicate success, and finally building specific metrics to track on a dashboard."

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