On november 2020, The Nielsen Norman group published the results of the UX metrics and ROI report. For 14 years, the Nielsen Norman group collected case studies and UX metrics from real-life projects. This collection of data allowed them to look back over a variety of design projects since 2006 and see how the impact of UX design has changed. The results are interesting as the average UX improvements are shrinking over time. This doesn’t surprise me but first i’ll explain how the metrics are calculated.
For each metric pair, they calculated an improvement score — an estimate of the relative magnitude of each design project’s impact on the metric, expressed as a percentage. For example, imagine that the conversion rate on an ecommerce site was 2% before a redesign. After the redesign, the conversion rate was 5%. In this case, the ratio between the two values of the metric (after and before) would be 5/2 = 2.5, for an improvement of (5-2)/2 = 1.5 = 150% in the conversion metric.
The report states the following, UX improvements have substantially decreased since 2006–2008: from 247% to 75% which is a 69% decrease. This difference is statistically significant as they can be quite confident that average improvement scores are lower now than they were 12–14 years ago.
So what does this mean:
1: the UX industry has become mature. Knowledge and experience have grown over the years and we’ve learned a lot about what works and what doesn’t work.
2: Does this mean that most UX problems are now fixed, and all designs perfect? This is absolutely not the case. Perhaps there are a few organisations to be found where there is little room for improvement but there’s still room for improvement for the majority of experiences.
3: Does this mean that UX has become less important? Absolutely not and i am not preaching for my own parish here. Design optimisations are still important and consumer are still raising the bar every day. A website made today won’t be accepted in 5 years time.
Read the full story here: https://www.nngroup.com/articles/ux-gains-shrinking/
