Measuring User Happiness is Product Management

Tomer Sharon, Head of User Research and Metrics at Goldman Sachs, discusses the most important user experience metrics and how to shift to a more customer-centric and data-driven culture.

Tomer Sharon has quite the pedigree, having worked at Google, WeWork, and as Head of User Research and Metrics at Goldman Sachs. His experiences has given him unique insights into user experience metrics and the most effective approaches to shifting to a more customer-centric and data-driven culture.

Tomer says it’s not enough to simply launch a product. Customers need to enjoy the product. To determine if they do, you need metrics on how users interact with it.

To explain the importance of measuring user experience, Tomer begins with the example of a concert. Whereas a useful business metric for a concert would be ticket sales, this only tells you part of the story. As a researcher, you should measure how people act during the concert. In this case, self-reported data such as happiness or satisfaction, and behavioral metrics, such as the percentage of people dancing at the concert and the number of people who leave early, let you know whether or not people actually enjoyed the concert. Ticket sales can give a sense of how successful the marketing campaign may have been, but even with a sold-out show, if it’s bad, people won’t show up to the next one. In other words, user experience metrics help predict future business outcomes.

To determine what behaviors to track, first have a conversation with your team about key events within the product, and then pick the three most important events or features you want to measure. Once you’ve selected those, Tomer suggests measuring happiness, adoption rate, 7-day active users, and retention rate by default. Some metrics like retention and adoption are easy to calculate on a consistent basis. Happiness is more ambiguous, so when asking users to quantify their happiness, Tomer says to make sure you use a scale from 0 to 100. This makes is  easy for anyone to understand the data and track it over time.

Be very specific with what you measure, Tomer says. Don’t measure overall happiness, retention, adoption, etc. with the product, and avoid using a Net Promoter Score (NPS). When you measure overall numbers, you can’t see what specific event or feature moving the needle.

Ultimately, Tomer says the key is not to be data-driven, but data-informed. Well-measured data will help you make decisions but it can’t decide things for you.

You’ll learn a lot from this episode about user experience metrics and customer-centricity.