In this #mtpcon San Francisco 2023 keynote, Tomer Sharon, Co-founder and CXO at workplace experience platform anywell, talks about measuring the user experience and the advantages of high-level metrics. Watch the video in full of read on for his key points. 

He starts by asking the audience to rate the conference so far and wonders what variables would affect their answers – the time, the temperature, their past experience might all come into play.

Tomer then tells a story from his time working on the Google Search team more than 10 years ago. The team loved looking at two metrics, long and short clicks. The team thought that long clicks – where a user clicked on a link and stayed there for a long time – were good, because the user had gone to the right place. They thought short clicks – where the user clicked back and forth through many links  – were bad. It was only when they watched users in a lab that they realised this wasn’t the case. “It was just that the internet was a mess and they couldn’t find what they were looking for,” Tomer says.

Experience metrics

Experience metrics are quantitative scores for important and actionable phenomena related to using products and services, Tomer says.

He splits a product launch into four stages of a cycle – someone has the idea, you build it, launch it and learn from it.

• Tactical research happens from the time we learn something till we have an idea
• Strategic research should happen all the time. It looks into motivations and needs
• Metrics come into their own after product launch, when we want to learn

The biggest challenge that a team has is understanding the answer to the question “how are we doing?”, Tomer says. Dashboards aren’t clear, and there’s no clear answer to this question and so teams focus on detailed metrics rather than high-level metrics. “People strive to solve the problems that humans have but they’re not looking at the data that helps them to solve these problems,” he says.

Principles of high-level metrics

Tomer then talks about some of the principles of high-level metrics and overall versus specific metrics. “I’d argue that coming up with a number for an overall satisfaction score should not come from a question about the overall experience.It should come from a series of questions about the most important components which are then aggregated into one score.”

You should also focus on behaviour rather than opinion, because our opinions are very unstable. “Satisfaction is extremely biased and there are other, more telling, metrics that show the actual behaviour,” Tomer says.

Tomer moves on to the Google Heart framework of metrics (happiness, engagement, adoption, retention, task success), omitting the last metric of task success because it’s more relevant to tactical research. Happiness is opinion, he explains, but the other three metrics are behavioural.

One of the biggest advantages of high-level metrics is that you can very quickly understand what’s going on. They can be extremely useful in creating OKRs, Tomer says, and for understanding the effect of change.

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