Kimberly-Clark Professional Division + UserTesting

Yuan Zhou, Global UX Design Lead at Kimberly-Clark, was on a mission to tie the impact of UX directly to the company’s bottom line. With a major redesign planned for one of the company’s digital properties geared to business buyers, she wanted to ensure that the team had a way to measure improvements and learn how to optimize further.

Good UX design is meant to be invisible, so Yuan struggled, like many fellow UX professionals, with measuring the impact of major design changes over time and communicating the results effectively with key stakeholders across her organization. 

Most metrics her team was tracking, such as website analytics and NPS surveys, weren’t meaningful measures of UX. NPS is an attitudinal measure of loyalty and doesn’t incorporate how users behave. While site analytics account for how users behave, many factors outside the experience may impact analytics. Those statistics don’t help identify those factors and how to improve them.

To get a holistic measure specific to the impact of UX on key business metrics, you need a score that incorporates both what users are doing and how they feel about your site, product, or feature. Most commonly used ways to measure UX rely only on attitudes—what users say and feel—or only on behaviors—what users do.

Yuan was looking for a measurement framework that allowed her to cascade organizational goals, down to product goals, and ultimately to translate those into meaningful measures of UX. That way there would be alignment across stakeholders on how UX can impact the overall business and how that would be operationalized. 

Enter UserZoom’s QXscore.

UserZoom’s QXscore is a meaningful, easily understood standard for measuring user experience that aligns to strategic business KPIs and identifies tactical areas to improve UX health. It quantifies users’ attitudes and behaviors into a single score that can be used to track progress over time, relative to competitors, or across multiple lines of business, digital properties and products. This makes it easy for business leaders to evaluate UX performance while providing digital experience stakeholders with insights into how to improve. 

In Yuan’s case, the team measured progress over time with the QXscore -- before and after the redesign. This allowed them to take into account specific user behaviors that impacted sales and support costs, along with attitudinal measures like ease of use. The end result was a single metric that the team shared with stakeholders to track and prove how the changes in UX from the redesign impacted business outcomes. 

Yuan’s team was able to collect the kind of data that comprise the QXscore with UserZoom’s UX Insights platform. UserZoom has capabilities to do task-based usability testing and record task success rates and time on task, as well as collect questionnaire responses afterward for the attitudinal measures. Only UserZoom’s platform has capabilities to measure what users say and feel and what they do -- at scale -- in a single solution. 

The UX Design team had evidence of impact with the QXscore measures taken before and after the redesign. For example, as a result of the redesign, the QXscore revealed that the team had increased the task success rate by 19% and reduced the time on task by 36%.

They were able to translate those findings into annual cost savings on customer support and communicate the impact of UX on business outcomes across the organization. Moreover, because of the specificity of the QXscore calculation, they could diagnose areas of improvement, prioritize features for development, and further research to support it.

Now, Yuan and her team prioritize their work better and have more confidence in communicating their impact across the company.