The competitive advantage of benchmarking your UX research

Today’s post is an excerpt from our eBook,  Keeping score: Why and how you should benchmark your UX. Enjoy!

Benchmark studies add a quantitative component to your UX research that helps support your findings with trackable data. Over time, you’ll begin to see trends that will help inform better design and business decisions. There are numerous benefits to benchmarking, but here are a few we see most often.

Gain buy-in with quantitative historical data

An experience, by definition, is subjective to each individual. It’s not surprising, then, that in the UX community, we tend to rely on qualitative measures when evaluating user experience. As a result, it can sometimes be challenging to get buy-in from data-driven stakeholders who prefer to reach statistical significance before making a change. So does that mean you can’t measure user experience? Definitely not. Benchmarking your UX research not only adds a quantitative layer to your UX research, but it also enables you to historically track your results with data everyone can quickly understand. One of the advantages of benchmarking your UX is that it empowers teams to demonstrate the impact of UX research on key business metrics like conversion rates, cart size, and repeat purchases.

Competitive advantage

It’s not just your own products you should be interested in. While your teams will naturally be striving to create the best experience possible, always improving upon a previous version, it’s hard to know how much better your product is if you’re not comparing to your competitions’. When you incorporate competitive UX benchmarking with your UX research strategy, you give yourself a clear, measurable way to keep score with your competition. No matter how great your product is now, there’s always a chance your competition will catch up with you. By establishing a baseline of KPIs and measuring them against your competition’s, you’ll always know where you stand and where you can improve.