👉 UMUX (Usability Metric for User Experience) is a concise 4-question survey designed to measure the usability of digital products.
✔️ UMUX is highly versatile and can be used across various digital platforms, making it a valuable tool for UX teams in different industries.
⚖️ UMUX is cost-effective and offers high response rates, providing quick and reliable insights without requiring extensive resources.
📊 UMUX is a powerful benchmarking tool that allows comparison of product usability against industry standards and across different products.
🚀 UMUX supports agile development, offering real-time feedback that helps teams iterate and improve products rapidly.
Whether an app, a website, or a platform, the ease with which a digital product can be used and adopted by users is the alpha and the omega for its success. This is why companies need to find ways to measure usability, ensuring that their product meets and exceeds users’ expectations. And this is where the Usability Metric for User Experience (UMUX) comes into play.
According to Harvard Business Review, acquiring a new customer is anywhere from 5 to 25 times more expensive than retaining an existing one. This further stresses the importance of measuring the usability of our digital product to ensure the satisfaction and retention of users.
There are an abundance of usability metrics and frameworks available out there but the Usability Metric for User Experience certainly stands out!
In this article, we will explore this invaluable usability metric as a standalone tool but also in comparison to other metrics. Keep reading to learn more, including real-world applications of this tool and ways to integrate it into your research.
What is the Usability Metric for User Experience (UMUX)?
The Usability Metric for User Experience also known as UMUX is a short usability questionnaire that was created to measure the user experience of digital products. This usability tool was designed by two UX experts James R. Lewis and Jeff Sauro as a response to the need for one reliable and concise usability metric.
The UMUX questionnaire quickly gained popularity as it could easily be integrated into the various stages of product development.
Why use UMUX?
UMUX offers a host of advantages as a usability metric. Here are some key ones:
High response rates
High response rates are sought after when it comes to any type of UX study. UMUX, being a concise and quick questionnaire is praised for its high response rates and overall completion rate.
Contrary to some of the most traditional usability tools out there which consist of a large set of questions, UMUX is an easy-to-complete 4-question survey that can give you a good indication of the consensus around the UX of your digital product without asking users to sacrifice a ton of time for this!
Versatile application
Another key advantage of this usability tool is its versatility. Usability Metrics for User Experience is a highly versatile tool that was designed for applications in a range of digital products including websites, apps, and digital platforms.
It is exactly this versatility that makes UMUX an invaluable tool for UX teams in every industry no matter the product.
Cost-effectiveness
What is more, contrary to other time-consuming usability methods, UMUX is a cost-effective tool that can be used by organizations of all sizes regardless of the budgets and resources available. On top of that, UMUX is a standardized tool that has proved its reliability and validity across different contexts.
Effective benchmarking tool
Another great benefit of UMUX is that it can also be perceived as an effective benchmarking tool. UX Benchmarking is an important aspect of usability research as it can be a great indicator of the product’s performance against industry standards.
Using this tool businesses can have one standardized way of measuring usability not only within their product but across different products as well!
Agile development support
Last but not least, UMUX is a great agile tool that can be integrated into agile development methodologies which is all about quick iterations and continuous improvement.
Hence, UMUX is a solution that provides real-time actionable insights for those businesses that want to iterate quickly and efficiently.
Main Components of UMUX
To better understand the power of UMUX, it is critical to understand the main components of the Usability Metric for User Experience. Here are the 2 key components:
Ease of use
UMUX assesses the ease of use of a digital interface by asking users to rate how easy or difficult they think the product is to use. For instance, a typical UMUX item can be ‘I find it easy to use this product’.
These types of questions are a great way to capture how users feel about the usability of the product. A low rating might mean that the interface requires a redesign or some kind of improvement.
Perceived usefulness
The second component that the questionnaire assesses is the perceived usefulness. For example, a typical UMUX item here can be “The system’s capabilities meet my requirements’’. These types of questions are all about assessing how effective the product is and whether it meets their expectations.
In a nutshell, by evaluating the ease of use and the perceived usefulness of the digital interface, Usability Metric for User Experience (UMUX) can be a good indicator of the product’s overall usability.
UMUX and Other Usability Metrics
Here is a handy comparison of UMUX with some other commonly used usability metrics:
UMUX vs UMUX-Lite
First things first, let’s explore the difference between UMUX and UMUX-lite as this is something that comes up quite frequently. UMUX-lite is a shorter version of the original UMUX. More specifically, the original survey consists of 4 questions while the streamlined version is reduced to just 2 questions.
For example, a typical UMUX-lite could consist of those two questions: “Does this system meet my needs? Is this system easy to use?” UXUX-lite can be particularly useful since it is even quicker and easier to be completed by users.
On top of that, this tool can be particularly handy for mobile apps as users might not be willing to spend a lot of time completing lengthy surveys.
Worth noting is that although UXMUX-lite is a reliable usability tool that researchers across the board trust, this cut-down version might fail to offer more in-depth insights in comparison to the original UMUX. This is why, UX researchers should be aware of the trade-offs for each tool.
UMUX vs SUS
Another comparison that comes up quite often is that of the UMUX versus SUS, which stands for the System Usability Scale questionnaire. The system Usability Scale tool is another widely used usability metric and it is the outcome of a 10-question survey around the usability of a product.
This metric has been around for a long time and it is trusted amongst researchers. The users need to rate the product using a 5-point Likert scale. In the end, the rating is converted into one single usability score.
Overall, this tool offers a more in-depth understanding of the usability of the product and pinpoints areas of improvement.
However, this comes at a cost as the survey is quite lengthy and complex so the likelihood of the users dropping out is high, hindering in this way the results of the survey. Hence, UMUX can be a great alternative to SUS as it can generally guarantee higher response rates while still being a reliable metric for the product’s usability.
How to calculate the UMUX score?
Now that we have briefly touched upon other alternative metrics, it is time to delve into the UMUX score and get a better understanding of how one can calculate this score. Usually, this is a source of stress amongst a lot of UX researchers but fear not as calculating the UMXUM score is a pretty straightforward process.
Before we begin, it is handy to know that each of the 4 questions that make up the UMUX survey can be answered by users using a 7-point Likert scale ranging from ‘strongly disagree’ to ‘strongly agree’. Those ratings are all collected and processed resulting in one quantitative metric. Here is a step-by-step process so that you can get a good grasp of the methodology behind it.
1. Collect user responses
Start by collecting the responses of the users. Each of the four questions is rated on a 7-point response scale ranging between ‘strongly disagree’ and ‘strongly agree’.
2. Reverse-code negative questions
Before jumping head first into calculating the score, you need to remember that two of the UXUM questions are negatively worded in an effort to reduce bias.
This means that the higher the user agreement with those two items the lower the usability. This is why, this item needs to be reverse-coded beforehand. For instance, if the user has responded 1 then this should be converted to 7, 2 to 6 and so -on and so forth.
3. Do the math!
Once you have reverse-coded the two negative questions it is time to sum up all the scores of the participant. When you did that, multiply the number by 4.1667 (or 100 / 24).
As a result, you’ll get a score between 0 and 100, which will be the participant’s UMUX score. The UMUX score of the product would than be the average of all the participant’s scores.
4. Interpret the results
As a rule of thumb the higher the UMUX score the better usability it indicates, meaning that users are finding the system in question easy to effective and efficient. On the other hand, a lower score might indicate that there are areas for improvement that the product team should work on.
Real-world applications of UMUX
UMUX is an invaluable tool for every UX researcher’s arsenal. Here are some real-world applications of this tool to get a better hang of its transformative power in practice:
Mobile app A/B testing
The product team of a robust mobile app is working on the optimization of their current interface. This is why the UX research team has decided to launch a UMUX survey to track usability across the two different versions of the app design.
Apart from the A/B metrics with the launch of the UMUX survey, the product team was able to better understand which version worked better for the users. The UMUX score played a definitive role in selecting the winning version.
E-commerce platform iteration
A successful e-commerce platform was on the lookout for a usability tool that would be able to provide the product team with insights into the usability of their checkout process as the conversion rates were not great.
They decided to add the UMUX survey on that part of their e-commerce platform to understand what the users who attempted to buy something on the website thought about the usability of the platform.
The results indicated that users were finding the checkout process to be a frustrating experience, so the UX team created a user journey map to better understand the different touchpoints and try to enhance those.
Learn more about user journey maps and how to build them in this quick video:
Website redesign
An established website went through a major redesign and the UX team was keen to gather insights about the usability of the new design. To assess the effectiveness of the redesign the UX team deployed the UMUX tool.
The survey revealed that the redesign was indeed a success as users reported higher satisfaction rates!
Gather UMUX responses with UXtweak
UMUX is a powerful tool that every UX researcher and product team out there should tap into to measure and understand the general usability of their product. If you are new to UMUX and you are looking for a way to incorporate it into your research look no further.
UXtweak is the best platform out there that can help you hit the ground running with collecting and analyzing your UMUX responses! Our easy-to-use survey tool allows for customization, making it super easy to design the UMUX questionnaire.
Try it yourself with a free account! ⬇️
