October 1, 2024 Smashing Newsletter: Issue #476
This newsletter issue was sent out to 194,882 subscribers on Tuesday, October 1, 2024.
Editorial
After years in the making, we’ve just launched our new video course on How To Measure UX and Design Impact 🧭 — a practical guide for designers, researchers and design leads to measure UX and visualize design impact — from scratch. Jump to the details.
But how do we actually measure UX? What metrics do we use? How do we showcase the incredible value that we, as designers, are producing? In this newsletter, we are looking into just that — with useful eBooks, resources, guides, and UX scorecards you can use.
On our end, we are getting ready for the wonderful Smashing conferences of the year — and we can’t wait to see you in person and online:
- SmashingConf NY 🇺🇸 (Front-End & UX, Oct 7–10) (last tickets!)
- SmashingConf Antwerp (Design & UX, Oct 28–31) 🇧🇪 (last tickets!)
And if you happen to be in Berlin, drop by BTConf Berlin (Nov 7–8), organized by our dear friend Marc Thiele — a friendly and inclusive conference for designers and engineers. For now, though, let’s dive into UX metrics and Design KPIs — and start measuring!
— Vitaly
1. Getting Started With Measuring UX
Measuring UX helps eliminate human bias. But let’s be honest: if you’re just about to set foot into the world of UX metrics, terms like UMUX or SEQ can seem quite intimidating. No worries, they don’t have to be, and you don’t need to be a statistician to evaluate a design, either. To help you take your first steps towards objective evaluation, Roma Videnov wrote an easy-to-read guide to measuring UX.
The guide focuses on choosing metrics and elaborates on four metrics in detail: UMUX-Lite, Level of Success, Time on Task, and Single Ease Question (SEQ). For each metric, Roma explains how to calculate its score and how to report it, and he shares templates (for a nominal price) and useful links to dive deeper. A wonderful introduction to measuring UX. (cm)
2. Free eBooks On UX Impact
Design and business depend on each other. However, designers often find themselves in situations where they need to justify their work — particularly when everyone thinks it’s optional. If you’ve been in the same situation before and are looking for a strategy to better show and communicate the impact your work makes, Ryan Rumsey’s free eBook Play Up Your Impact is for you.
Play Up Your Impact gets you familiar with the basics of measuring. You’ll learn how to incorporate statistical thinking and math into your decisions and how to frame arguments for design in business outcomes. Perfect for designers, researchers, strategists, and writers.
Another great read that helps designers adopt a business mindset to communicate design value and incorporate business impact into their approach is Business Thinking For Designers. Also written by Ryan Rumsey, it teaches designers to gain more trust and build better relationships with business partners. Both eBooks can be downloaded for free once you’ve entered your email. Happy reading! (cm)
3. Introduction To Attitudinal Metrics
Did a user find a task overly complex to complete? Did they feel confident using the system? Attitudinal metrics help us back up questions like these with data. Markéta Kučerová wrote a comprehensive introduction to get you started.
Attitudinal metrics provide valuable insights into task complexity, user satisfaction, and usability, and they allow us to compare results between different designs or designs of competitors. In her guide, Markéta takes a closer look at Net Promoter Score (NPS), Customer Satisfaction (CSAT), System Usability Scale (SUS), and UMUX, how they work, and their pros and cons. Precious insights to support your qualitative research with the necessary numbers and plan a strategy for your product. (cm)
4. Measuring System Usability Scale
Theory is good, but how do companies incorporate UX metrics in their daily workflow? The GitLab team shares valuable insights into how they measure System Usability Scale (SUS) to learn more about the long-term usability of their product.
In the GitLab Handbook, they explain how they choose participants and define cohorts for testing, how they distribute survey invites, and how they calculate and interpret SUS scores. They also published an outline for how they reach out to survey respondents who have opted-in to have a follow-up discussion with the UX team. It is a fantastic opportunity for product designers and managers to learn more about the usability challenges for their specific product area. (cm)
5. Upcoming Workshops and Conferences
That’s right! We run online workshops on frontend and design, be it accessibility, performance, or design patterns. In fact, we have a couple of workshops coming up soon, and we thought that, you know, you might want to join in as well.
As always, here’s a quick overview:
- Accessible Typography for Web & UI Design Masterclass design
with Oliver Schöndorfer. Oct 10 – 18 - Cascading Style Systems: Resilient & Maintainable CSS dev
with Miriam Suzanne. Oct 14 – 18 - Interface Design Patterns UX Training (Autumn 2024) ux
with Vitaly Friedman. Nov 1 – Dec 2 - Advanced Design Systems workflow
with Brad Frost. Nov 12–20 - Figma Workflow Masterclass design
with Christine Vallaure. Nov 13–22 - Building Modern HTML Emails dev
with Rémi Parmentier. Dec 2–10 - How To Measure UX and Design Impact ux
with Vitaly Friedman. Dec 4–12 - Jump to all workshops →
6. Accessible Usability Scale
Accessibility is still often an afterthought in many projects. To help you ensure that users of assistive technology can use your digital product without encountering any accessibility barriers, the team at Fable created the Accessible Usability Scale (AUS).
AUS is a free tool that makes measuring usability for assistive technology users easy. Inspired by the System Usability Scale (SUS), it consists of ten statements and calculates a score based on how strongly respondents agree or disagree with them. Assistive technology users can complete the AUS survey without support in less than 10 minutes. A great addition to your testing toolkit. (cm)
7. UX Scorecards
The insights you gain from quantifying the user experience also need to be communicated to stakeholders. UX scorecards are a straightforward way to do so. They provide a quick overview of metrics and enable teams to clearly identify priorities for their next sprint. Matthew Garvin shares insights into what this can look like in a real-life project.
In his post on UX scorecards, Matthew shows how he measured and communicated the user experience of a prototype for a product he was working on. It includes practical tips for calculating scores for Success Criteria Scoring (SCS), Single Ease Question (SEQ), and Usability Metric for User Experience Lite (UMUX-Lite) and putting it all together in an “insights forward” summary. Practical tips that you can apply to your project right away. (cm)
8. New Video Course: How To Measure UX And Design Impact
Ready to dive deeper? Well, we have something very special coming up for you: Our brand-new video course “How To Measure UX & Design Impact” with Vitaly Friedman. Meet a 8-hour long journey to UX metrics and design KPIs, sailing in unchartered waters every now and again.
From establishing team-specific design KPIs to translating ambiguous objectives into practical design goals and making sense of OKRs, SUS, UMUX-Lite, TPI, KPI trees, feedback scoring, gap analysis, and Kano model, the course is filled with plenty of examples to help you measure UX. Jump to details.
9. Recently Published Books 📚
Promoting best practices and providing you with practical tips to master your daily coding and design challenges has always been at the core of everything we do at Smashing.
In the past few years, we were very lucky to have worked together with some talented, caring people from the web community to publish their wealth of experience as printed books. Have you checked them out already?
- Success at Scale by Addy Osmani
- Understanding Privacy by Heather Burns
- Touch Design for Mobile Interfaces by Steven Hoober
- Check out all books →
That’s All, Folks!
Thank you so much for reading and for your support in helping us keep the web dev and design community strong with our newsletter. See you next time!
This newsletter issue was written and edited by Geoff Graham (gg), Cosima Mielke (cm), Vitaly Friedman (vf), and Iris Lješnjanin (il).
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