The Net Promoter Score (NPS) is the most popular UX Benchmarking tool out there for measuring perception. We ask “How likely are you to recommend us to a friend?” and usually base a lot of next steps on this one question.
The problem with relying on an NPS score is that it tells us about user loyalty but that’s only one piece of the perception puzzle. Apart from loyalty, here are other user perception metrics that you should be thinking of:
Credibility
Appearance
Usability
Clarity
These metrics make up the SUPR-Q framework and in this article, you can read about how CXL applied this to assess 4 competing beauty websites.
How does this work?
In the case study above, 100 users were given a task to perform on each one of 4 beauty websites. After performing the task stated on the websites, they had to rate each one based on a list of questions centred on the metrics above.
Apart from the actual survey, users were also asked open-ended questions to help qualify the results. For instance, when it comes to usability, the goal is to find out if the website is easy to use and if it’s easy to navigate. But what makes a website easy to use? What does it mean when you say a website is easy to navigate? You get answers to these questions by asking qualifying questions that help give insights into what the user actually means. These questions are referred to in the survey as sub-dimensions and are explained here:
Based on the evaluative statements for each category, we can infer sub-dimensions in the form of questions. Qualitative feedback offers common descriptions that help answer each:
What makes a beauty and cosmetics website easy to use?
Ease of use, speed, good filtering/sorting
What makes it hard to use?
Slow to load, poor navigation, filtering, or sorting
What makes a beauty and cosmetics website easy to navigate?
Helpful categories, filters, and an easy checkout
What makes navigation difficult?
Misleading, not intuitive
QUICK WINS FOR NEW PMMS
If you can’t do the full SUPR-Q, prioritise usability as it covers most of the other metrics.
Panels are another great way to do UX testing. Here are a couple of panels you can use:
Amazon Mturk - powerful, if quirky, panel provider
Clickworker - for many EU countries
Cint - finding anyone, anywhere, $$$$
If you’d like to learn more about Voice of Customer research the module in the CXL minidegree is a great place to start!