UX Rings: A UX Survey and System for Measuring Experience Success

UX Rings is a UX survey and scoring system that measures the overall quality of a product or service experience across five segments: functional, usable, comfortable, delightful, and meaningful. It combines quantitative and qualitative data to give product, design, and marketing teams a multidimensional view of where their experience succeeds and where it falls short.

Why Do You Need Both Data and Empathy to Measure UX?

Most business professionals lean one of two ways. Data junkies obsess over metrics, love numbers, and if they can't quantify it, they aren't interested. Empathizers sit at the opposite end of the spectrum, caring more about user feelings, emotions, perceptions, and other qualitative signals.

UX design has historically been a purely creative discipline, where designers use intuition and empathy to develop solutions that connect with their users. Over the past decade or so, many designers have developed a more data-driven approach and become obsessed with tying everything back to numbers.

In the past, you could use either approach to gather good information and develop smart products. But today, UI/UX design isn't so black and white. The best products and services don't just rely on data OR feelings -- they use both.

The problem is there are plenty of techniques for tracking qualitative information (user interviews, personas, journey mapping, etc.), and plenty of tools for tracking quantitative information (analytics, conversion rate, usage duration, etc.). But there isn't one that does both.

That's why we created UX Rings.

What Is UX Rings?

UX Rings is a UX survey and system for measuring the overall quality of a product or service experience. It uses the Experience Success Ladder as a starting point and then assesses the strengths of the experience in five segments: functional, usable, comfortable, delightful, and meaningful.

What Is the Experience Success Ladder?

The Experience Success Ladder is a high-level, linear benchmark. It evaluates how high your product or service has "climbed" and suggests the next rung or segment of the ladder to aspire to.

How Does UX Rings Go Further Than the Experience Success Ladder?

UX Rings takes the Experience Success Ladder a step further. It provides a multidimensional ranking that combines quantitative and qualitative data to assess your product's or service's performance within each segment. As you improve to a certain level in each segment, you complete a ring. The goal is to finish all five rings -- the epitome of a successful product or service -- with mastery of each segment of the user experience.

How Does UX Rings Work in Practice?

The clearest way to understand UX Rings is to see it applied to real products.

QuickBooks Online: 1 / 5 UX Rings

QuickBooks is the biggest player in small business accounting software. Millions of businesses use it to automate the reconciliation process, maintain a clean set of books, and save time and money. QuickBooks used to only be a native app for Mac and Windows, but in 2001 they launched an online version. Since then, the company has redesigned QuickBooks Online several times to improve the user experience.

After evaluating QuickBooks Online using the Experience Success Ladder and putting it through UX Rings, it's clear that the product leaves a lot to be desired.

It may look slick and have an appealing visual design, but the user experience remains clunky, confusing, and frustrating for the average user. In an attempt to reach the delightful and meaningful rings, QuickBooks Online has sacrificed basic functionality, usability, and comfort. Unless they improve these areas, customer satisfaction and sales are at risk.

Asana: 3 / 5 UX Rings

Then there's Asana, a project management tool that our team at Drawbackwards uses to plan projects, track tasks, and communicate about those tasks without getting bogged down in email.

Using the Experience Success Ladder, we can see that Asana has built a strong product and climbed to the higher segments of the ladder. But the ladder only provides a high-level overview of Asana's UX performance. It doesn't tell the full story.

Like any product, Asana is stronger in some areas and weaker in others. Just because it has reached the Meaningful rung of the Experience Success Ladder doesn't mean it's perfect. There are plenty of areas for improvement within each of the segments.

That's where UX Rings comes in. After putting Asana through the UX survey, we see that it has completed 3 of the 5 rings and has varying levels of success within each segment. Using the Success Report generated from UX Rings, the Asana team could learn specific next steps they could take to complete the remaining segments and refine the overall user experience.

Slack: 4 / 5 UX Rings

Slack's messaging system is a testament to the power of good UI/UX design. The company has not only mastered the basics of building a functional, usable, and comfortable product, but also infused delight and meaning to create a loyal base of diehard fans. This dedication to UX catapulted Slack from a startup to an $8 billion+ giant in just a few years.

UX Rings reflects Slack's success. The product scores high in almost every segment and has completed 4 out of 5 UX Rings. As with any product, there's always room for improvement, but Slack has achieved more UX success in just a few years than most products have in their whole lifetime.

What Do You Get From the UX Rings Success Report?

The Success Report delivers an overall score, a breakdown of strengths in each Success Ladder segment, and recommendations for concrete action items your team can take to boost the product or service to the next level.

The Success Report is hugely valuable for product, marketing, and design teams because it:

• Allows you to have a quantifiable conversation with designers and developers about the strengths and weaknesses of your product or service
• Contributes to more focused design critiques and sketching sessions
• Educates upper management on the important experience attributes they should measure
• Empowers you to track progress and demonstrate improvement to upper management
• Makes budgeting, project planning, and resourcing conversations easier by providing a tool that demonstrates the time and iteration it takes to create meaningful experiences

Take UX Rings for a Spin

The full UX Rings system is now in beta at UXrings.com. It begins with a simple UX survey that you can use to start tracking customer satisfaction and gathering feedback in less than three minutes. As your users' responses come in, the UX Rings dashboard will measure the quality of your current user experience and provide a Success Report with suggestions for improvements.

As with any MVP (minimum viable product), there's plenty of room to learn, iterate, and improve. The current version of UX Rings is our MVP. Be one of the first people to try it out and let us know what you think. We're still tweaking the questions and fine-tuning the scoring engine, so email us at feedback@drawbackwards.com with any feedback on your experience and suggestions for improvement.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is UX Rings and what does it measure? UX Rings is a UX survey and scoring system that measures the quality of a product or service experience across five segments: functional, usable, comfortable, delightful, and meaningful. It combines quantitative and qualitative data to produce a multidimensional score.

How is UX Rings different from other UX measurement tools? Most tools track either quantitative data (like analytics and conversion rates) or qualitative data (like user interviews and journey mapping) -- not both. UX Rings combines the two to give you a fuller picture of where your experience stands and what to fix next.

What is the Experience Success Ladder? The Experience Success Ladder is a linear benchmark that evaluates how far a product or service has progressed across five experience segments: functional, usable, comfortable, delightful, and meaningful. UX Rings builds on this framework by adding multidimensional scoring within each segment.

How long does it take to run a UX Rings survey? You can start tracking customer satisfaction and gathering feedback in less than three minutes using the UX Rings survey.

What does the UX Rings Success Report include? The Success Report includes an overall experience score, a breakdown of strengths in each segment of the Experience Success Ladder, and specific recommendations for concrete next steps your team can take to improve the product or service.