Notes from UKUPA talk on UX and ROI

An excellent evening at Sapient Nitro, herewith some notes and a few thoughts. There was also a good Twitter stream for #UXROI, and @yahnyInLondon did beautiful sketchnotes.

There were four speakers. First up was Joe Leech (@MrJoe) of CxPartners in Bristol (slides here), who pre-emptively trumped all the numbers to follow with a figure of $3.6 billion, the money that flows through the systems he's involved with, each year. He pointed out that the climate for UX practitioners was much more competitive now, with easy wins being a subject for nostalgia, and also mentioned the idea of MVT (multi-variate testing) as "a threat to UX", an interesting idea which coloured my perception of the rest of the evening.

Joe distinguished between Visionary Metrics ("what and why",- emotional, attitudinal factors such as Net Promoter Score) and Strategic Metrics (operational stuff such as conversion ratios, as provided by MVT / AB testing).

His checklist for metrics to be useful, rather than just analysis paralysis:

1. Does the metric have a timescale?
2. Does it have a benchmark?
3. Does it have a reason to be reported?
4. Does it have an associated action?

He then gave us two key metrics to think about:

1. Net Promoter Score: asking how likely a customer is likely recommend your product, site or service to a friend of colleague, in order to judge their overall perception of quality. Very popular with management, in some cases included in personal targets.
2. Conversion Ratios: important to attach a dollar amount to drop-outs at each stage, makes it easier to justify work on that area. What's a good conversion rate? Really hard to answer in general - it depends, but likely to be between 2% and 7%. How much can I expect conversion to improve? It depends, but "by about 0.25% to 0.5% for a full end to end UCD process"