Metrics to Look for when Considering an App Redesign

As a product manager or a designer, it is sometimes difficult to ascertain if it’s the right time to rework your app design. Customers and stakeholders always have their eyes on your app and are eager for design refreshes and updates. You cannot always meet their expectations right away. Also, you cannot afford to go without design updates for a long time. The consideration of multiple metrics will help in making the decision to revamp an application at the right time. Measuring the impact of a feature update also relies on redesign success metrics.

Before getting into these, let us begin with some signs of the need for a design revamp!

Tell-tale signs that your app needs a design revamp

There are quite a few qualitative and quantitative indicators involved here. Both are a result of constant monitoring and studying of app performance, which takes thorough analysis at all times.

Qualitative indicators:

If you are evaluating B2B apps, you need to account for these indicators.  

1. Company/brand revamp:

When your company is going through a brand rehaul, its values and its overall design language might change. Whether this happens in the case of a B2C app, or in the case of a B2B app where the clients and industries you cater to are changing, it is a sure-shot sign to redesign.

Of course, when yours is a single enterprise app, it’s much easier. This would also make sense when the entire industry is experiencing a shift.

2. Look and Feel Issues::

You may start getting more customer complaints about qualitative issues with your app. These may range from the UI being dated to general application complexity. If you are getting qualitative complaints related to look and feel, non-intuitiveness, cognitive load, or similar factors, a redesign of the user experience is needed.

Quantitative indicators

These indicators need benchmarking backed by strategic inputs from both design and product teams.

1. Decrease in productivity:

In the case of a B2B enterprise app, if the businesses you’re serving are experiencing a drop in productivity levels, indicated by productivity metrics, your app is probably not serving its purpose anymore. The productivity loss can be from various factors, such as- increased downtime, breakpoints in workflows, too-many-clicks to do a task- etc. These factors can help you decide on doing a revamp.

2. Falling Business Metrics:

A B2B SaaS app business owner would be closely monitoring metrics such as user adoption, user engagement, and customer retention to ensure the business remains healthy. A fall in these scores can lead to the discovery of app design issues. Moreover, these may be contributing to the declining scores.

3. Declining Customer Satisfaction:

As part of annual subscription renewals, a B2B SaaS firm may collect comprehensive customer satisfaction scores. Declining scores from too many problem tickets, long learning ramps, etc., may indicate that your application has grown too complex and needs to be simplified.

Whether it is an enterprise or a SaaS B2B app, design revamps need to be largely data-led. This way, they cover all bases and give higher chances of success.

In the words of the American father of management thinking, Peter Drucker, “What gets measured, gets managed.”

It’s high time to apply this thinking to UX design and app design as well!

Behavioral metrics to consider for design revamp

These are more general metrics than design-specific ones. However, they provide a clear picture and tell you how well your UX UI design is being adopted, engaged with, and the kind of reactions it is gathering.

1. Adoption rate:

This refers to the percentage of new users of an app or an app feature. The formula for adoption rate is:
  Adoption rate = Number of new users/ Total number of users

Consider this: You have 1000 users and 250 of them are new

So, your adoption rate comes out to be 25%.

Adoption rates are always calculated for a specific period, which could be a week, a month, or a few weeks/months.

Adoption rates, like any other metric, need to be benchmarked. If these are low as compared to earlier or to competitor metrics, you need some more qualitative and/or quantitative research to find out what users need and work on your redesign accordingly.

You can use the results to show the success of a redesign.

2. Engagement rate:

Engagement is different from adoption, unlike popular belief. Remember, adoption just refers to new users; while engagement refers to the actual time and activity spent by all users on your app. The simple formula for engagement rate is:
Engagement rate = Total active users over a certain time period/Total number of users
Moreover, you can measure the Engagement rate for a specific time period, for a specific feature, for a specific channel, or for a specific consumer segment. It is a measure of the value realization your consumers have with your app. If consumers are adopting your app but not engaging with it, the deeper reaches of your app may need a revamp.

3. Customer retention:

Retention rate refers to the percentage of users who continue using the app after a  certain amount of time. The formula is:

Retention rate for X days = Current number of users who open the app after X days/ Total number of users at the beginning of X days
Alternatively, retention rates in a SaaS business could be measured as the number of existing customers who renew their subscriptions. In a perpetual license model, it would be measured through the percentage of support contract renewals.

You can benchmark retention against your own previous records, or against competitor metrics for retention. High rates of customer retention rate is one of the major redesign success metrics.

Attitudinal scores to monitor

While behavioral metrics are crucial, adding attitudinal metrics is what will provide a complete picture.

1. System Usability Scale:

The SUS is a quick tool with which you can test the usability of an app. It consists of a 10-point questionnaire with the answer for each ranging from a scale of strongly disagree to strongly agree.

source

The amazing thing about SUS is that it is basic and one can do it done offline as well. However, it continues to work in the online age as well. Some experts are also of the opinion that a SUS works better than homegrown questionnaires and surveys.

The questionnaire results will be in the range of 1 to 100. You can check out the exact calculation methods here. A good SUS score is quite a subjective matter, but that’s where benchmarking comes in. You record your SUS over time and check for improvements. When scores start falling below your acceptable range, you know it’s time for an upgrade.

2. Net Promoter Score:

The NPS can help show customer loyalty and satisfaction in one concise and simple metric. Studies have also illustrated that it is correlative with a company’s growth. In an NPS survey, users are asked only one question: How likely is it that you will recommend this app to a friend or colleague? The answer is put on a scale of 0 (very unlikely) to 10 (very likely).

Further, answers are divided into 3 categories on the NPS scale, which are: 

• Detractors: 0 to 6
• Passives: 7 to 8
• Promoters: 9 to 10

These are the elements used in calculating the NPS, the formula for which is:
Net Promoter Score = (Number of promoters – number of detractors) ÷ (number of respondents) x 100

You can either calculate NPS for entire organizations or groups of customers manually or use the plethora of online survey tools available for this purpose.

3. Customer Satisfaction Score:

Similar to but simpler than NPS, the Customer Satisfaction Score can be another redesign success metric for your app. With CSAT, users are asked: How satisfied are you with this app? The result comes in a percentage scale, where 100 indicates maximum satisfaction from the user’s end. It is usually a scale of 5 consecutive ratings from very dissatisfied to very satisfied. The calculation formula is as simple as:
CSAT = (Number of satisfied users/Number of total users surveyed) X 100

Since this score is easy to record and calculate, it can be taken at various levels of a design revamp. This way, you can find out exactly where issues begin and end and which element needs a relook.

Case Study

Now, let’s discuss an example. In order to differentiate Yuyiii as India’s first-weekend getaway discovery platform, the UX needed to stand out and cater to the niche travelers who had a number of criteria in mind when choosing a travel destination. So, the UX approach needed to be contextual to suit traveler needs. Following the lean design approach, we implemented the learnings from the user research and came up with an attractive, intuitive design that was functionally complete.

Results from three design iterations- 

• The platform has successfully established itself as the preferred travel partner for the urban population who have specific requirements to plan their trips.
• With our design, Yuyiii has reported a 151% increase in the average session duration with a 21% jump in returning users.
• Moreover, the niche travel solution provider is experiencing popularity in selling its activity packages with 90% bookings coming from the mobile interface.
• The web platform maintains a good rate of visitors (even during Covid) with the help of curated video and photo content of travel destinations created by Divami in partnership with the Yuyiii team.

Final thoughts

A critical challenge with many B2B SaaS firms, particularly following a few years of market presence with their existing application, is whether it is time to revamp their application. There can be different business and technical reasons for having that question. But, when the issue is UX UI design, the qualitative and quantitative measures will help in providing an answer.

With these KPIs, you can not only draw tangible comparisons with in-house or industry benchmarks but also explain the impact of design revamps to non-design teams in a language they understand. Basically, these metrics are what eventually bring design, research, product, and management together to bring out a successful app, whether it is B2B, B2C, enterprise, SaaS, or any other type.

As a leading UX UI design services firm, Divami puts significant focus on improving the performance metrics in an application design revamp.

Check out our design portfolio to browse some of the revamped designs and/or contact Divami for more information.