PyData Global 2024

Measuring the User Experience and the Impact of Effort on Business Outcomes
12-03, 20:30–21:00 (UTC), General Track

How do you know when a user experience isn’t hitting the mark? Do you wait for it to show up in qualitative feedback? Do you have a long list of different metrics that you have to keep track of that could potentially signal a problem? When evaluating user experiences, how can you quantify if it’s a good experience or not? Additionally, how do you know if your good or bad experience is impacting other areas of the business?

These are common problems for product managers and the data scientists and analysts who support them. To solve them, I propose creating an aggregate metric that represents the effort or friction experienced by your users - a User Effort Index.


Creating a useful User Effort Index includes:

  1. Identifying the data that can actually signal a problem (versus creating noise)
  2. Assigning weights to represent how much friction each data point represents for a user

This can be achieved through data exploration and statistical analysis- but should also be informed by your product knowledge.

Once created, you can use a User Effort Index to improve the user experience through EDA, A/B testing, automation, cohort analysis, and more.

My talk will go through the steps of creating a User Effort Index and suggestions for how to use the metric to improve the user experience.


Prior Knowledge Expected

No previous knowledge expected

Maggie Wolff is a Marketer turned Data Scientist, with two decades of experience spanning multiple industries including travel, e-commerce, corporate real estate, healthcare, and non-profits. She holds a Master of Science in Data Science from DePaul University and a Bachelor of Arts in Communication from Loyola University Chicago. Currently, she is a Data Scientist focused on product analytics with American Express Global Business Travel.

Maggie also serves as an ambassador for Women in Data Science Worldwide and helped organize the first MeasureCamp conference held in Chicago.