A Little L.A.M.

What are the best statistics for a UX Team to collect about its product?

• Great paper on UX metrics, by Kerry Rodden and Hillary Hutchinson, who are UX Researchers at Google.
• Measuring the User Experience on a Large Scale: User-Centered Metrics for Web Applications: http://research.google.com/pubs/pub36299.html
• It's an academic paper, so it's a little dry, but well worth the read. Here's a quick summary: Teams should focus on metrics that indicate:
• Happiness - Often measured through a long-running survey that includes a Net Promoter Score.
• Engagement - Visits per user per week. Or posts per user. In Gmail, we carefully watch a metric we call "5 of 7". It's the percentage of users that visit the product at least 5 out of 7 days a week. (This metric turns out to be predicative long term retention)
• Adoption - Measured as daily active users (DAUs). Or commonly at Google: 7-day-actives, which is the number of unique users who have used the product once in the last week.
• Retention - There are many ways to measure this. I like looking at the percentage of 7-day-actives who are still 7-day-actives a week later, a month later, and 3 months later.
• Task success - This can be measured by looking at abandonment rates in any task, or looking at time-to-completion of key tasks.
• For example: on Quora, you may measure how long it takes to answer a question, and how many people start to answer, but do not finish. The paper goes into much more detail about "... articulating the goals of a product or feature, then identifying signals that indicate success, and finally building specific metrics to track on a dashboard."