Chapter 1. Introduction

The goal of this book is to show how usability metrics can be a powerful tool for successfully evaluating the user experience for any product. When some people think about usability metrics, they feel overwhelmed by complicated formulas, contradictory research, and advanced statistical methods. We hope to demystify much of the research and focus on the practical application of usability metrics. We’ll walk you through a step-by-step approach to collecting, analyzing, and presenting usability metrics. We’ll help you choose the right metrics for each situation or application, and show you how to use them to produce reliable, actionable results without breaking your budget. We’ll give you guidelines and tips for analyzing a wide range of usability metrics and provide many different examples of how to present usability metrics to others in simple and effective ways.

Our intention is to make this book a practical, how-to guide about measuring the usability of any product. We aren’t going to give you a lot of formulas; in fact, there are very few. The statistics will be fairly limited, and the calculations can be done easily in Excel or some other common software package or web application. Our goal is to give you the tools you need to evaluate the usability of any product, without overwhelming you with unnecessary details.