User Centered Metric

Hui Lin, Quantitative User Researcher @Google

July 1, 2021

Why do you care?

If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it.
—— Peter Drucker

Why do you care?

If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it.
—— Peter Drucker

What to measure? Let’s start with a caveat:

When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. —— Goodhart’s Law

What do organizations track?

Page view, Uptime, Latency, Seven-day active users and Earning (PULSE)

Acquisition, Activation, Retention, Referral, Revenue (AARRR!) or user funnel

  • Commonly used large-scale metrics
  • Focus on business or technical aspects of a product
  • They are all extremely important and are related to user experience.

However, they don’t give the full story

PULSE and AARRR: low-level or indirect metrics of user experience

  • Problematic when used to evaluate the impact of user interface (UI) changes
  • Ambiguous interpretation

Why is there a rise in page views?

Are the two the same happy story?

Are the two the same happy story?

What is user-centered metric tracking!?