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Key Experience Indicators: How to decide what to measure?

Tomer Sharon
4 min readJun 30, 2018

When you measure smaller parts of the experience (only important ones, not everything), you get an indication of what specifically works well and what doesn’t. You can then dive deeper into the problem areas to understand why.

Chef Antonella opened her new restaurant six months ago. Everything has been going really well, it seemed. Revenue is up and to the right, tables are reserved in advance, and the restaurant is full and lively every single night. Business metrics show a very positive picture.

Chef Antonella also measures two key experience indicators she cares about. These paint a different picture. Close to 100% of customers are new. She has almost no returning customers. Second, on average, 70% of food is left on the plates. Something is wrong although business is great.

🔑 Why measure experience?

Key Experience Indicators (KEIs) provide a quantitative score of a specific, important, and actionable phenomenon related to using a product or service. Measuring KEIs has the following benefits:

  1. KEIs provide information to decision makers.
  2. KEIs precede or predict business outcomes.
  3. KEIs give insights into qualitative findings and customer anecdotes.

🔬Considerations of KEI measurements

What vs. why: KEIs will never explain themselves. To understand a KEI, one must invest in qualitative research.

Tomer Sharon
Tomer Sharon

Written by Tomer Sharon

Principal at UX+, an agency specializing in financial services, author of Validating Product Ideas & It's Our Research,. Ex-Google, WeWork, Goldman Sachs.

Responses (11)

What are your thoughts?

Attitude vs. behavior: what people say does not necessarily match how they behave. People’s attitude is interesting yet behavior is much more telling. Give more attention and weight to ...

1,000 times YES to this! Let’s get beyond measuring attitudes (which can be situational) and measure something that is *actually* happening. This is what our solutions aim to do — change behaviors. Let’s make sure we’re measuring just that!

4

Meanwhile, please 👏👏👏, share, and comment. I’d ❤️ to hear from you. How difficult (or easy) is it for you and your team to decide what to measure?

Tomer Sharon, thank you for the wealth of insight.
I recall a time at WeWork back in 2016 when you gave a presentation to my team (NMD, inside sales) on your efforts to measure experience in phone booths etc.., it was fascinating.
Now that I am in…

2

Thanks this is very interesting. Question for you: If business is great for Chef Antonella what should she measure? This is quite unusual, a packed restaurant while 70% of the food is left on the plates… I’m intrigued!

2