Hello, everyone. Today we will cover an interesting and important topic for every digital product. As people who work in UX, whether as designers or researchers, we like to know who our users are, how frequently they use our product (whether it's once in a blue moon or a few times a day), and whether efficiency is important to them. What is their primary driver? Let's zoom out a bit and take a look at the two main ways we can categorize many questions we have about the UX of the products we work on.

Performance

Performance is strongly related to the behavior of users. Everything users do and how they interact with the product can be considered as performance and is measurable in many different ways. How successful they were in completing the task can be broken down into metrics such as time spent on the task, the number of mouse clicks, or the number of errors. Lostness (difficulty of navigating) and learnability (time spent before becoming proficient) are also important factors to consider. There are many ways to quantify the performance of UX and the levels of success. The most important takeaway from the performance aspect of UX is that it is an important part of almost every product, but it is crucial for ones where users don't have a choice in using a different option. This is the case with a company's internal applications.

Satisfaction

The opposite of the performance aspect (what people do) is satisfaction (what people say or think). What people think, also known as self-reported data, can also be measured and influenced. User satisfaction is an inevitable key component for every product competing in the consumer market where users have some or many choices. An example of a satisfaction metric is the rating of the experience, such as how easy it was to use and whether it exceeded expectations.

Correlation

Do the two aspects correlate? Well, not always. It is interesting to know that performance and satisfaction don't always go hand in hand. Many studies have proved this. Sometimes, a product with perfect performance that works perfectly well can be rated poorly in satisfaction. In contrast, there are products where users faced many difficulties during basic tasks' performance and were rated as outstanding. The key takeaway is that focusing just on one aspect is not enough, we need to consider both aspects in order to have an accurate picture.