In this competitive digital market, UX benchmarking can be an invaluable tool to ensure that you are constantly delivering value for your users.
If you are new to UX benchmarking, in this guide we have collated everything you need to know about this technique including but not limited to the various types of UX benchmarking, key metrics to consider as well as well as industry examples to help you put it into practice and drive product improvement!
What is UX benchmarking?
UX benchmarking is a process by which we compare and measure the product user experience against some predefined industry standards, historical data, or successful competitors. UX Benchmarking is a way to pin down the performance of your digital product on different aspects of user experience such as usability, user retention, and accessibility.
Thus, through this process, the product team has a unique opportunity to identify areas of improvement and fine-tune the product accordingly.
Chris Rourke, a UX expert, highlighted that UX benchmarking is crucial for gaining a competitive edge. More specifically he stated that:
UX benchmarking offers clear comparative quantitative evidence that motivates clients to implement design changes. It provides insights and meaningful improvements that are essential for maintaining a competitive advantage in digital experiences 
Types of UX benchmarks
Before you engage in a UX benchmarking exercise for your product, it is handy to know the different types of UX benchmarks:
1. Competitive benchmark
First things first, competitive benchmarking is about comparing the user experience of your product with other successful businesses that are operating within your market space.
This kind of UX benchmarking can be an invaluable tool to not only investigate areas where your competitors might have a competitive edge but also discover the areas where your product is strongest.
For instance, if your competitor has a better-converting website than you then you can benchmark it with yours and shed light on the areas that make that particular website outperform yours!
2. Historical benchmark
On the other hand, historical benchmarking revolves around comparing your UX metrics with historical data from your product’s performance.
This is a great way to track progress over time and understand if your product is doing better. Historical benchmarking is a great way to assess if the performance of your product has improved or worsened, especially if a redesign or some changes have taken place.
Ki Arnould emphasized the value of tracking performance over time claiming that:
Benchmarking provides a quantitative dimension to the qualitative research you’re already doing, driving home your findings and adding weight to your suggestions. It’s intensely gratifying to track a product’s successes and failures over time, allowing for data-driven improvements 
3. Industry benchmarks
Industry benchmarking is yet another type of UX benchmarking by which you can compare the UX metrics of your digital product with some predefined industry standards.
This way, you can understand how your product performs compared the other businesses in the market. Industry benchmarks are a valuable tool to ensure that your product meets the expectations of the users.
4. Internal benchmark
Last but not least, internal benchmarking is all about comparing your different user experience metrics across the different products or the different features within your business.
With this type of UX benchmarking, businesses have a unique opportunity to learn from their own mistakes and successes and establish best practices that they can then apply throughout.
What is the value of UX benchmarking?
UX Benchmarking is an invaluable tool that goes beyond tracking metrics as it provides actionable insights for product refinement. Here are some of the key advantages of UX benchmarking:
Pinpointing areas for improvement
Pinpointing areas for improvement is one of the most critical advantages of UX benchmarking no matter the type of benchmarking you choose to conduct. Benchmarking is all about finding those areas where the product underperforms and working on them.
Understanding market position
Having a clear understanding of the position that your product has in the market is another great benefit of UX benchmarking. This allows you to conduct a SWOT analysis and better understand your strengths and weaknesses.
Tracking progress over time
UX benchmarking is a great tool to keep track of the performance of your product over time. By constantly evaluating the key metrics of your digital product you can evaluate how the iterations that you have made have impacted the product and adjust accordingly.
Understanding user expectations
Grasping the expectations of your users is another great perk of conducting a UX benchmark. If the results of your UX benchmarking indicate that your product does not meet the basic expectations of your users then this is a great indicator that changes should be made to refine the product.
Securing stakeholder buy-In
UX benchmarking is a great way to get hold of concrete data about where your product stands within the market in which you operate. This data-driven approach to product refinement is the perfect way to secure the stakeholders’ buy-in.
Improving conversion rates
Last but not least, UX benchmarking can be a great tool to identify friction that might be hindering conversions. By addressing those, you have a unique opportunity to boost your conversion rates and drive overall success.
5 Important UX benchmarking metrics
Here are 5 essential UX benchmarking metrics to keep in mind:
1. Usability metrics
Usability metrics revolve around evaluating the easiness with which users can complete tasks within the interface of your digital product. The task success rate, which is the percentage of users who complete a task, and the time on task, which calculates the average time that it takes a user to complete a task, are key here.
Finally, the error rate is another critical metric as a high error rate can reveal friction when someone is trying to complete a task.
2. Accessibility metrics
Accessibility metrics are all about measuring the accessibility of your digital products. Some of the key metrics here are the WCAG compliance rate, which indicates how your product meets the web content accessibility metrics, as well as the keyboard accessibility which indicates the ability of the users to use a digital product just with a keyboard.
3. Conversion metrics
Conversion metrics are another key set of metrics to keep on your list. One of the most critical metrics here is the conversion rate which is the percentage of users that complete an action such as a purchase and the drop-off rate which indicates the percentage of people that drop out before completing the action.
4. Retention metrics
Retention metrics are a good indicator of the ability of your product to retain its users. Customer Lifetime Value which is the total revenue expected from a user throughout and the churn rate, the percentage of users who cease to use the product are some of the most important metrics to look at here.
5. Net Promoter Score (NPS)
The Net Promoter Score is one of the most common metrics to measure customer satisfaction and loyalty. Users are asked to comment on how likely they are to recommend a product on a scale of 1 to 10. A high NPS indicates a good positive experience while a low NPS shows that the product is not meeting user expectations.
6. User Satisfaction Score (SUS)
Last but not least, the User Satisfaction Score is a simple yet effective metric that you can use as a barometer of user satisfaction. This metric is a result of a questionnaire that provides a single score that reflects the overall usability of the interface.
The UX benchmarking process: 6 steps
Here is a step-by-step process to nail your UX benchmarking process:
1. Define the scope of UX benchmarking
Start by defining the areas of the product that would want to evaluate. This could be the whole user journey or certain features.
Example: Imagine you are working on an e-commerce platform. You decide that the scope of your UX benchmarking will focus on the checkout process. This includes assessing how users add items to their cart, the ease of navigating to the checkout page, filling in shipping and payment details, and completing the purchase.
By doing this you exclude other parts of the user journey, like product browsing or account creation, to keep the scope manageable and focused on the most critical conversion steps.
2. Choose the benchmarking type
Once your objectives have been defined, you will need to select the type of benchmarking that best suits the needs of your project.
Example: After defining the scope, you decide to go with competitive benchmarking. This involves comparing your checkout process with those of your top three competitors. Your goal is to understand how your checkout process stacks up against theirs in terms of user experience.
You can also choose internal benchmarking if you have different products or platforms within your company and want to compare them against each other to identify areas of improvement.
3. Identify and select key metrics
Once you have identified the UX benchmarking process that fits your needs, it is time to identify the key metrics that you want to track and measure. This is the most crucial part of the UX benchmarking process. Choose from the metrics we’ve described above.
Example: Continuing with the e-commerce platform scenario, you decide to track key metrics such as task completion rate (how many users successfully complete the checkout process), time on task (how long it takes to complete the checkout), error rate (how often users encounter errors during checkout), and user satisfaction (measured through post-purchase surveys).
These metrics will give you a clear understanding of how efficient and user-friendly your checkout process is.
4. Identify the benchmark
Next up is identifying your benchmark. Find the metrics or standards you want to compare your product against. This can be either identifying direct competitors, past performance, or successful businesses outside your field of operation.
Example: You decide to benchmark your e-commerce checkout process against two main standards: your direct competitors (e.g., Amazon, eBay) and your past performance data from the previous year. By comparing these, you aim to understand how your current performance compares both to the industry leaders and your own historical data.
5. Gather data
Once you are clear on the industry standards you want to compare against, it is time to start gathering your data. Here you can get creative with your methods and use a combination of qualitative and quantitative methodologies.
Example: To evaluate the checkout process on your e-commerce platform and gather data on the metrics you’ve selected, you decide to use a combination of usability testing (qualitative), surveys and analytics tracking (quantitative).
For usability testing, you recruit a group of users to complete a series of tasks within the checkout process while observing their interactions and collecting feedback. Simultaneously, you use post-purchase surveys and analytics tools to collect quantitative data and track user behavior, such as the number of users who abandon their cart at different stages, the average time spent on each checkout page, and the frequency of errors.
This combination of methods gives you a holistic view of how users go through the checkout process.
6. Make a case study for proposed improvements
Finally, identify the areas of improvement as well as the areas in which your product excels and make a case study for the proposed improvements. Create a presentation or a report to share with your team and other important stakeholders.
When should you conduct UX benchmarking?
Please be aware that UX benchmarking is not a one-off project! On the contrary, UX benchmarking is all about continuous improvement so it should take place throughout the product lifecycle.
However, UX benchmarking can be particularly useful before a product enters the market or before a major redesign to ensure that your products meet and exceed users’ expectations before introducing or re-introducing it to the market.
Which UX benchmarking tool should you use?
Choosing the right research tool can be the alpha and the omega for a successful UX benchmarking process. Although there are an array of tools out there that specialize in data collection you should consider adopting one comprehensive tool that can cover everything.
Our recommendation is UXtweak as it has all the research tools you need in one place. From user testing to quntitative data, UXtweak can help you easily create benchmark tables and hit the ground running.
UXtweak makes mixed-method research easy, allowing you to run surveys and usability tests, and other research studies simultaneously, collecting data for future product improvements and understanding benchmarking metrics.
What you also get with UXtweak:
- An extensive User Panel to recruit testing participants from
- Advanced analytics and usability testing metrics tracking abilities for your studies
- Intuitive UI
- Multiple data export options for your stakeholder reports
- 12 different research tools in one place
- A free plan for small projects
UX Benchmarking template to optimize the process
Using a UX benchmarking template can really help you stay on track when performing a UX benchmarking process. This industry-approved Figma Benchmark Template is a simple yet effective template and offers a good basis for building and optimizing your UX benchmarking process.
3 UX benchmarking examples
Here are a few examples to better grasp the concept of UX benchmarking:
1. Website redesign
An ed-tech company was doing a major website redesign so they wanted to ensure that the change was for the better. This is why they decided to conduct a historical benchmarking to compare key metrics before and after the redesign.
They found that indeed after the change some of the key metrics such as the task completion rate had skyrocketed indicating a successful redesign.
2. App competitor analysis
An upcoming fintech app wanted to better understand how its product compares to other competitive apps out there. They conducted a competitive benchmarking focusing on user adoption and loyalty.
After completing the benchmarking process, they pinpointed areas of improvement when it came to strategies to penetrate the market as well as different loyalty schemes in an effort to outperform their competitors in those key areas.
3. Platform NPS improvement
A public healthcare app wanted to improve the NPS score on a new feature that they have recently launched. They decided to conduct an internal benchmarking process to compare the net promoter score across the different features of the platform.
The product team was able to understand which features were working well and why. Based on these findings they were able to further fine-tune that particular feature to ensure that it would also meet the user’s expectations and needs.
Wrapping up
If you are looking to improve your product’s user experience then UX benchmarking is one of the most powerful tools to do so. UX benchmarking offers a great framework via which businesses have a unique opportunity to systematically measure and analyze user metrics.
This way, they can better understand the areas where their product is underperforming and make data-driven decisions to further enhance it.
If you’re looking for a good UX research tool to support all your benchmarking activities, you’ve come to the right place. UXtweak has all the tools you need to collect qualitative and quantitative insights for UX benchmarking!
Register for your free account and start conducting research today!
