Measuring the usability and the overall user experience wasn’t very popular for many years, mostly because it requires a lot of resources – suitable facility, time, evaluators etc. Fortunately in the last few years the interest in the usability tests even with the small vendors increased. There are now online services that would do the tests for you and will present you the final data.
But what has this to do with OKRs? The data. The measurable data, the numbers converts to key results and respectively a goal in a heartbeat. In this post we’ll show you a simple way to record the usability tests results, then convert them into Insights and Key results.
So, the two main metrics you chase when conducting a usability tests are Task Completion Rate and Task Completion Time. The names speak for themselves – how many of all people successfully completed a task and how much time it took them to do it. As an example we will use a CRM vendor who needs these two metrics for some of the basic tasks in their software. Here is a sample list of the tasks that would be performed during a test:
Register
Login
Schedule activity
Add activity
Update pipeline
Add new deal
Delete a deal
So, your records should include information about each test/task – how much time it took and was it successful. You can use simple Excel file hosted on Dropbox, so you can easily update with new tasks and metrics.
Connecting data
First we need to connect the Gtmhub account with this Excel file hosted on Dropbox. Upload your file to dropbox, click share and copy the link. Then go to your Gtmhub account > Setup > Data sources > Add new data source . From the list choose Files > Spreadsheet . Enter a name (for example: “Usability tests”) and paste the link in the second input field. It is important to change the last symbol from 0 to 1 (…ics.xlsx?dl= 1 ). Otherwise Gtmhub won’t be able to sync the data. Your usability tests are now connected with the your Gtmhub account.
Creating the entities and the insights
You have the excel data connected so now you have to start to benefit from it. Create an entity that correspondents to the excel’s schema and map the fields. With the given data we can produce at least two insights – Overall completion rate and Completion time and rate by task (so you’ll know where the usability fails) . The code for both the entities and the insights used in the example are available here:
And this is the final result, two beautiful UX insights:
What about the OKRs?
Right! Now that you have the insights just attach them to your Goal (For example: Increase the Completion rate) with a single click and turn the data into actionable Key Result. The progress will be tracked automatically while you focus on conducting the tests and improving the results
Finale
By spending few minutes to add this kind of automation you will get:
Transparency and motivation – it’s an OKR postulate. Finally everyone will know what happens in the foggy UX team. The measurable results are available for everyone on an insightboard.
Automation – you can focus on the tests, and not spending time to file status reports or daily progress check-ins
Analysis – the case used above is the simplest scenario possible. If you include dates or other factors you can run hundreds type of correlations over historical data (possible with our super awesome “R” Algorithm engine ) and see how the changes are related and what is important.
If you need help setting such insights for your organization drop us a line at [email protected]