User experience (UX) focuses on the design and usability of a website, application, or product. Continuously improving digital products involves analyzing metrics, gathering user feedback, and making iterative design changes to enhance user experiences. Good UX means the user can easily solve problems or fulfill their needs. This leads to greater user satisfaction, a higher conversion rate, and fewer business costs.
Still, we all know that only the user decides whether your product has good or bad UX. So, how can you ensure that you and your design team are doing everything correctly and that the product will provide a great user experience?
That’s where UX design KPIs come in. As Eleken is a team of product designers, measuring UX metrics and design KPIs is one of the core components of our work on projects. UX KPIs allow us to measure the product’s success rate in numbers and see how effective the design truly is. Also, when we make improvements to an existing interface, tracking the right UX KPIs helps us understand whether those updates work as intended.
As you may have already understood, in this post we want to discuss what metrics to use to measure user experience and therefore the success of your design solution.
So, we’ll:
- Explain the difference between the two main types of UX metrics
- Provide you with UX metrics and KPI examples
- Tell you how to collect data for them
- Show how and when to use these design success metrics in real-world projects
Understanding UX performance isn’t just about intuition or aesthetics — it’s about tracking real numbers that reflect how users interact with your product. That’s where UX design KPIs come in. Before diving into frameworks and methods, let’s look at the most common KPIs that product teams rely on to measure usability, engagement, and satisfaction.
Quick List: Key UX Design KPI Examples
Before diving deeper, here’s a quick overview of the most common UX design KPIs used by product teams:
- Task Success Rate — measures how many users complete a specific task successfully, focusing on the percentage of completed tasks.
- Time on Task — tracks how long users take to complete an action or workflow.
- Error Rate — identifies how often users make mistakes while interacting with your product.
- Bounce Rate — shows how many users leave after viewing only one page or step.
- System Usability Scale (SUS) — a standardized usability score based on user surveys.
- Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) — measures how satisfied users are with a specific product or experience.
- Net Promoter Score (NPS) — evaluates how likely users are to recommend your product to others.
Each of these UX KPIs allows you to measure design impact in numbers, compare performance across product versions, and align UX outcomes with your business goals.
These UX KPI examples show what to measure, but understanding why they matter is just as critical. Let’s explore the importance of UX KPIs — and how tracking them helps product managers connect design decisions to real business outcomes.
Why measuring UX design KPIs matters
Before we get into the specific metrics, it’s worth understanding why UX KPIs matter in the first place. Great design isn’t just about how your product looks — it’s about how efficiently users can achieve their goals and how those experiences drive business outcomes.
Tracking UX design KPIs helps product teams turn subjective feedback into measurable insight. When you can quantify user satisfaction, engagement, or friction, you can make better decisions about where to focus design effort and development resources.
For product managers, UX KPIs connect usability with business metrics like activation, retention, and churn. By tracking these metrics, you can ensure you have satisfied customers, which leads to higher retention and a better user experience. They make it possible to justify design changes, communicate ROI to stakeholders, and track improvements over time. In short, KPIs let you see whether your product is simply attractive — or truly effective.
Now that we understand why UX KPIs are essential for improving product performance and user satisfaction, the next step is knowing what to measure.
Main types of UX metrics
UX metrics help you understand the current state of your user experience so you can decide which direction to take for improvement. Generally, we divide design KPIs into two types: behavioral and attitudinal.
- Behavioral metrics focus on what users actually do — how they navigate, click, or complete tasks.
- Attitudinal metrics focus on what users think and say about your product.
Over time, these two groups of metrics allow you to track, compare, and improve the quality of your user experience from both a data and sentiment perspective.
Let’s start with behavioral metrics — the numbers that show what users actually do inside your product. These indicators help you see how people interact with your design, where they succeed, and where friction might appear.
Behavioral metrics
Behavioral UX metrics show how users interact with your product in real time. They focus on observable actions that reflect usability, navigation flow, and efficiency. These metrics often reveal design friction, confusion, or unnecessary steps — things that impact satisfaction and conversion.
There are many behavioral metrics, and this list will provide the most helpful ones to measure and track changes in the quality of the user experience:
Pageviews
Pageviews is an engagement metric that shows the number of pages users have viewed on your site over a specific period. It helps reveal whether users are genuinely interested in your content or struggling to find what they need.
To add context to this metric, it’s best to combine it with others like average session duration, bounce rate, or conversion events. A high pageview count might indicate strong content engagement — or it might mean users can’t locate the right information.
Time per task
Time per task (TPT) determines how long it takes users to complete a specific task, such as filling out a form or making a purchase. To get the average TPT score, you add up all user times and divide by the total number of participants.
In most cases, the shorter it takes for the user to succeed, the better the UX. A decreasing average TPT after a redesign often signals improved usability and smoother flows.
Task Success
This key UX KPI measures the percentage of customers who successfully complete a specific task (for example, finishing checkout or uploading a document).
How to calculate:
The more respondents you have, the more accurate your Task Success result will be. You can also compare success rates between new and returning users to see how your UX evolves over time.
Errors rate
Error rate shows how many times users enter incorrect information (make mistakes while completing the task). It allows you to understand how user-friendly your product is.
There are two ways to calculate the error rate:
- If it is possible to make one error per task (or there are many error opportunities, but you want to track only one), we calculate the error occurrence rate:
For example, three out of twenty users made a mistake when entering their password. We calculate the error rate as follows:
3/20=0,15x100=15%
- In case it is possible to make several errors per task, you can calculate an average error occurrence:
For example, 5 users were filling in the billing data, this task has 6 error opportunities. User 1 made one mistake, user 2 - three mistakes, user 3 made no mistakes, user 4 made two mistakes, and user 5 - two mistakes. And we calculate the average error occurrence rate:
(1+3+0+2+2)/6x5= 0,26x100=26%
Bounce Rate
The bounce rate shows how often users give up on a task, such as filling out payment details. To learn why users bounce, combine this metric with some of the attitudinal metrics we will discuss below.
Collecting data for behavioral metrics is quite easy. Moreover, it can be done automatically without involving an interviewer or observer. You can collect behavioral metrics data in web analytics and application analytics based on user sessions on the site, search history, bug tracking, and so on. So, this is an easy and inexpensive way to start tracking UX metrics.
You can also track these metrics with the help of other UX research methods: observation, A/B testing, eye tracking, usability testing.
All these metrics are, of course, important, but they do not give a complete picture and understanding of why you are getting these numbers. And this is where attitudinal metrics come into play.
While behavioral metrics show you what users do, they don’t always explain why they do it. That’s where attitudinal metrics come in. These indicators capture users’ thoughts, feelings, and perceptions, giving context to the numbers and helping you understand the story behind their actions.
Attitudinal metrics
Attitudinal metrics measure what people say and how they feel about your product. There are fewer of these indicators than behavioral ones, but they are not of less importance. Here are some of them:
SUS (System Usability Scale)
This metric is widely used among UX designers and researchers. It is based on a survey that aims at evaluating the ease of use of a site or product. The survey consists of 10 questions, which the user should answer with a score from 1 to 5 (ranging from strongly disagree to strongly agree).
You can also use this metric to compare your product with competitors' or with your previous version before improvement. For this purpose, you take each score from respondents, add them together and multiply by 2 to get from 0 to 100 points. The average SUS score is 68.
If you get 68 or more points, then everything is OKAY with the usability; in case you've got lower than 68 – your product requires optimization.
CSAT (Customer Satisfaction)
It is often important to be aware of the overall level of user satisfaction concerning everything from features to app functionality. UX satisfaction can be measured using the CSAT – Customer Satisfaction score.
CSAT can give you a general idea of how users feel about your product, or it can provide you with more detail on specific features or stages of the customer journey. Typically, the CSAT is based on a scale from 1 (very dissatisfied) to 5 (very satisfied) and asks a question “How satisfied are you with the service/app?”.
But you can also be more specific and ask something like “How satisfied are you with finding the desired good?”, and such
To calculate the percentage of satisfied users, divide the total number of satisfied users (those who voted 4 or 5) by the total number of respondents and multiply by 100.
(Satisfied users/Total number of respondents) x 100 = percentage of satisfied users
NPS (Net Promoter Score)
If users tend to recommend your product, app, or website based on their experience, then your UX is probably good.
To track the NPS you need to ask users only one question: How likely are you to recommend this service/app/website to your friends and colleagues?
Users put the score from 1 to 10, where one stands for “not at all likely” and ten means “very likely”.
According to the results, we divide users into three categories: detractors (those who put from 1 to 6 points), passives (7-8), and promoters (9-10). And calculate the NPS by subtracting the percentage of detractors from promoters.
Now that you know the main types of UX metrics, the next step is choosing which ones to focus on. Not every KPI will fit your goals — the right mix depends on your product, users, and business objectives. Here’s how to decide which metrics will give you the most valuable insights.
How to collect UX research data for attitudinal metrics
There are many ways to measure attitudinal metrics but the most popular are polls, user interviews, and widget buttons.
User research plays an essential role in the UX design process, as it helps validate ideas, discover opportunities, and understand user needs. A dedicated user research team can provide deeper, data-driven insights by collecting and analyzing UX data, going beyond standardized metrics to uncover the reasons behind user behaviors and ratings.
Feedback button
The easiest, most efficient, and least time-consuming way to collect this kind of data is with a CTA you place on a website or app. Users click it whenever they want. You can install such CTAs along the entire user journey or in its specific part.
Targeted polls
Polls, unlike a button, are not activated by users, but by your app/website. They tend to be highly targeted, allow you to ask more questions at a time, and segment your respondents.
The two most popular types of polls are slide-out (slides out to the side of the screen) and full-screen (appears right in the middle of the screen). They are also used to recruit users for in-depth interviews or surveys.
User interviews
User interviews are an easy and effective way to get data/feedback from the customer. During the interview, you ask a user questions on a certain topic that you've prepared beforehand.
This method helped us a lot when we were working on the redesign of, a client experience platform. We conducted six interviews to gather information about their needs and priorities. We transformed the insights from these interviews into an empathy map (you can see it below) to get a deeper understanding of customers.
Remember that quality metrics are not enough to make UX improvement decisions. You will need to "enrich" this data with context and details that are missing. Behavioral and attitudinal UX metrics alone cannot provide answers to all questions.
At the end of surveys, ask open-ended questions so that users can justify their answers and give you more information. This is the only way to understand what experience they received, at what point it was good, and at what point something went wrong.
Collecting data is just the first step — the real value comes from knowing how to use it. Once you’ve gathered insights from surveys, interviews, and feedback tools, it’s time to apply them strategically. Let’s look at how to choose the right UX metrics for your product and turn raw data into meaningful design decisions.
How to apply and choose the right UX metrics for your product
It is impossible to create an objective list of, let us say, “5 best UX metrics to track”. There is only a classification into behavioral and attitudinal KPIs for user experience. And first of all, when choosing what to track we should take into account what is important for your customers, your business, and the user experience that you want to measure. Tracking UX activities and UX efforts through the right UX metric and key performance indicator is essential for aligning with business objectives. Teams should measure UX KPIs and refer to relevant UX KPI examples when selecting metrics. And with everything else, Google’s HEART framework will help you.
In 2010, Google experts wrote an article about the framework that helped them choose the right metrics for 20 different products. The essence of Google HEART is to effectively combine behavioral and attitudinal metrics.
HEART stands for Happiness, Engagement, Adoption, Retention, and Task Success. If you look at the description of each item below, you will realize that each of them is either behavioral or attitudinal:
- Happiness includes attitudinal metrics: CSAT, NPS, and SUS.
- Engagement includes usage metrics such as visits per user per week, number of photos each user uploads per day, average session length.
- Adoption and Retention include metrics such as the number of unique users over a while (to differentiate new (adoption) and existing/returning users (retention).
- Task success includes behavioral metrics such as task success rate and error rate.
All of these metrics are useless if they are not tied to some kind of user goal. For example, if your site visitors spend a lot of time on your website, this does not mean that your UX design is good. On the contrary, it can mean the opposite - they spend a lot of time just to complete a simple task.
So, firstly define the user goal (What do users want to achieve? How does the product help them reach their goal?) and following it choose the appropriate metric.
Once you’ve identified which UX metrics matter most, the next step is to turn them into measurable goals your team can track. Setting clear UX KPIs ensures that your design work aligns with both user needs and business outcomes. Here’s how to define and structure those KPIs effectively.
How to Set UX KPIs for Your Product or Team
Once you understand what to measure, the next step is deciding which UX KPIs matter most to your business and your users. There’s no universal formula — your KPIs should reflect the goals of your product, the maturity of your UX process, and the specific pain points you’re trying to solve.
Here’s a simple approach that many product teams use:
- Start from a business goal. For example, “Reduce onboarding drop-offs by 20%” or “Improve retention for new users.”
- Map it to a UX behavior. Identify what action reflects success — such as completing the onboarding flow or returning to the product weekly.
- Choose measurable UX metrics. For onboarding, this could be Task Success Rate, Time on Task, and tracking how many users complete the signup process successfully. For retention, it might be Net Promoter Score (NPS) or Customer Satisfaction (CSAT).
- Set a benchmark and target. Measure your current performance, then define an achievable improvement goal.
- Track and iterate. Use analytics and user feedback tools to monitor results after every design iteration.
For example, a SaaS product team redesigning their onboarding might aim to increase Task Success from 70% to 90%, ensure more users complete the signup process successfully, and reduce Time on Task by 25%. Those concrete numbers help everyone — designers, developers, and managers — align on what success looks like.
After setting your UX KPIs, you’ll need the right tools to monitor progress and gather reliable data. From analytics platforms to usability testing software, these tools make it easier to track, visualize, and interpret your UX performance in real time.
Tools for Tracking UX Metrics
Once your UX KPIs are defined, you’ll need the right tools to track them efficiently. The good news is that many popular analytics and research tools already include UX measurement features. These tools can track user interactions with the user interface, including features like the search function, to provide deeper insights into user behavior.
Here are some reliable options to start with:
- Behavioral analytics: Google Analytics, Mixpanel, UXCam, Amplitude — for tracking clicks, session flows, conversions, and how users interact with user interface elements such as the search function.
- Heatmaps and session recordings: Hotjar, Microsoft Clarity, Smartlook — for understanding where users click, scroll, or get stuck.
- Surveys and feedback collection: Typeform, Usabilla, Maze, UserTesting — for gathering attitudinal metrics like CSAT, SUS, or NPS.
- Usability testing and A/B experiments: Lookback, PlaybookUX, Optimal Workshop — for observing task completion and identifying design friction.
- Tracking dashboards: Airtable, Notion, or Figma plugins — for logging and visualizing KPIs across product teams.
At Eleken, our designers often combine behavioral data from analytics tools with attitudinal data from interviews or surveys. This mix helps us see both what users do and why they do it — a crucial balance when interpreting UX KPIs.
Even with the best tools in place, tracking UX KPIs isn’t foolproof. Many teams fall into common traps that lead to misleading data or wasted effort. Before you dive into your reports, here are some frequent mistakes to avoid when measuring UX performance.
Common mistakes when tracking UX KPIs
Even experienced teams sometimes struggle with measuring UX performance effectively. The most common issues arise when metrics are tracked without a clear context or connection to business goals. Applying principles from human-computer interaction can help teams avoid these common mistakes by ensuring that both quantitative and qualitative evaluation techniques are used to create more effective and intuitive digital systems.
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Here are a few pitfalls to avoid:
- Tracking too many KPIs at once. More data doesn’t always mean more clarity. Focus on 3–5 meaningful UX KPIs at a time.
- Ignoring user goals. A metric like Time on Page may look good, but if users are spending time because they’re confused, that’s a red flag.
- Neglecting qualitative insights. Numbers tell you what happens, but not why. Combine analytics with interviews and surveys to understand context.
- Measuring only short-term success. UX improvements often take time to influence retention or satisfaction. Track changes consistently over months, not days.
- Not communicating results. UX KPIs should guide design and product strategy. Regularly share updates across your team to ensure alignment.
In other words, the value of UX metrics lies not in collecting them, but in interpreting and acting on them.
By avoiding these pitfalls, your UX metrics will give you a clearer, more accurate picture of how users truly experience your product. With the right approach, tracking KPIs becomes less about numbers and more about continuous learning and improvement — which brings us to our final thoughts.
Bringing it all together: from data to better UX
“If you cannot measure it, you cannot improve it” – Lord Kelvin.
Without constantly tracking user experience KPIs, it’s difficult to understand if you’re on the right track and that the work you do is meaningful and rewarding.
Don’t miss the opportunity to use real-time feedback from users. Use both behavioral and attitudinal metrics to measure, compare and track the quality of the user experience over time. Analyzing user behavior through tools like Google Analytics helps you understand how users interact with your product, revealing their actions, preferences, and pathways — crucial insights for informing design improvements. UX metrics will also allow you to see how product changes affect customers and the business itself.
And of course, measuring the success of the user experience alone won’t help to ensure that your business is doing great. Read about key SaaS metrics to measure the right indicators and keep your business on track.
