What Is Experience Metrics?

Experience metrics are quantitative measures designed to evaluate the quality and effectiveness of user interactions within app and video streaming services. They play a crucial role in understanding user behavior, preferences, and satisfaction levels, because they represent how users interact with a platform, giving digital businesses valuable insights on optimizing their features, content delivery, and overall performance. 

The success or failure of a digital business can hinge on the quality of user experience they deliver, making experience metrics essential for assessing and improving service performance. A positive experience, characterized by seamless interactions and high satisfaction levels, encourages users to sign up, subscribe, and continue using the service. A negative experience can lead to user frustration, prompting users to seek out other platforms and services. Customer experience metrics are thus essential for evaluating the performance of digital platforms and for driving user engagement.

Crucial Experience Metrics

Experience metrics encompass various parameters that directly impact the user experience. These can include:

1. Buffering Rate

Buffering rate measures the frequency and duration of buffering interruptions during video playback. A low buffering rate provides a smooth viewing experience, enhancing user satisfaction. Monitoring buffering rates ensures the consistent delivery of high-quality video content—uninterrupted playback is essential for maintaining a positive user experience. By closely tracking and optimizing buffering rates, streaming services can ensure that users enjoy seamless playback without disruptions.

2. Connection Induced Rebuffering Ratio (CIRR)

CIRR, short for Connection Induced Rebuffering Ratio, is a metric that assesses the impact of connection-induced rebuffering incidents. These are unexpected pauses in video playback, caused by segments of the video downloading to the player or “buffering” more slowly than the average play rate. CIRR helps diagnose and address connectivity-related disruptions, ensuring a more stable streaming experience for users. By identifying connection-induced rebuffering, service providers can optimize network performance to improve reliability. This metric is crucial for ensuring a seamless viewing experience and minimizing user frustration caused by interruptions.

3. Average Bitrate

Average bitrate measures the data transfer rate during streaming, reflecting the quality of video playback. Higher average bitrates, meaning more bits transmitted per second, contribute to better video quality and resolution, enriching the overall user experience: The higher the bitrate, the higher the play rate. By continuously monitoring and optimizing average bitrate, streaming platforms can ensure that users enjoy high-quality video content with crisp images and smooth playback.

4. App Responsiveness

App responsiveness measures the speed and efficiency of app interactions, including navigation and content retrieval. A responsive app creates a seamless user experience by delivering quick and smooth interactions, promoting better user engagement and satisfaction. Quick start-up times leave a positive impression on users and increase the likelihood of repeat visits. By closely monitoring app responsiveness metrics, organizations can identify areas for improvement and optimize an app to deliver a better experience.

5. Loading Time

Loading time tracks the time it takes for an app or video streaming service to launch or load content. Fast loading times contribute to a positive first impression and improve user experience and engagement. Minimizing loading times reduces user frustration and ensures a smoother start to the streaming experience, meaning higher user satisfaction and better retention. Quick start-up times and minimal buffering are essential for video streaming, because they contribute to uninterrupted playback. Monitoring loading time metrics enables organizations to optimize their platforms for faster performance, delivering a seamless user experience from the moment users launch the app or start streaming content.

6. Navigation and Usability

Easy navigation and intuitive usability are essential for enhancing the app experience and maximizing user engagement. Metrics related to user interactions, such as clicks, swipes, and time spent on different screens, provide insights into navigation effectiveness and usability. Intuitive interface design and easy content discovery encourage users to explore and engage with the app or streaming platform. By closely monitoring navigation and usability metrics, organizations can identify areas for improvement and streamline the user experience to make sure users can always find what they need, ultimately driving user satisfaction, retention, and loyalty.

7. Error Rates and Technical Glitches

Tracking error rates, crashes, and technical glitches is key to maintaining a seamless user experience. Reducing app crashes and resolving technical issues promptly both improve overall user satisfaction and retention. Monitoring playback errors, video start failures, and stream quality can help identify and address technical challenges that may disrupt the user experience. Playback errors quantify instances where playbacks are prematurely terminated because of errors that occur after the initial rebuffering phase, while video start failure (VSF) monitors unsuccessful attempts to initiate video playback. By closely monitoring error rates and technical glitches, organizations can proactively address them and ensure a smooth streaming experience for users.

Significance of Experience Metrics

Experience metrics are the foundation of user-centric services, helping businesses identify areas for improvement and make data-driven decisions about how to act to enhance the overall user experience. Together, user behavior, preferences, and satisfaction levels can be expressed as quality of experience, or QoE. Monitoring QoE through experience metrics can inform strategic planning and resource allocation, ensuring that solutions that will have the biggest impact on user engagement and loyalty are prioritized. Keeping existing users engaged is crucial for long-term success.

• Continuous Improvement: Continuous monitoring of experience metrics allows providers to identify and address issues promptly, optimizing the service to meet user expectations and preferences.

• Competitive Edge: Understanding and leveraging experience metrics provide a competitive edge, allowing providers to differentiate their offerings by delivering a superior and consistently positive user experience.

• User Satisfaction: Experience metrics prioritize the user, offering a data-driven approach to enhance user satisfaction and engagement. Identifying areas for improvement is key to ensuring a seamless and enjoyable interaction with the app or video streaming service.

• User Retention: A positive user experience contributes to higher user retention rates, fostering loyalty and encouraging users to continue using the app or streaming service. When users are frustrated by any experience on the digital platform, they are more likely to give up, unsubscribe, and switch to a competitor platform, which decreases revenue. Users are not patient when they experience negative issues—there are a lot of other video streaming services out there. This fact also negatively affects average session lengths.

• Proactive Problem Resolution: Experience metrics enable the proactive identification and resolution of issues, minimizing disruptions that could negatively impact user satisfaction. Proactive problem resolution helps in maintaining a high-quality user experience, fostering user satisfaction and loyalty. By leveraging experience metrics to anticipate and resolve issues, organizations can differentiate themselves from competitors and build a reputation for reliability and quality, ultimately driving user retention and business growth.

Observing Experience Metrics with Conviva’s Experience-Centric Observability

A number of crucial experience metrics impact users every day. Tracking and trending them is a key way to gauge how users perceive their experiences. Conviva’s Operational Data Platform is a pioneering and exclusive tool that monitors and analyzes complex system performance, establishing a direct connection to business outcomes at internet scale and in real time.

12 of the top 15 largest global media companies trust Conviva to oversee experience quality for their users, customers, and viewers. Conviva’s platform processes 5 trillion daily events from 7 billion SDKs, transforming this huge volume of data into immediate, actionable insights that enhance the viewer experience. Conviva’s platform also offers a comprehensive perspective on backend issues affecting application performance. This enables in-depth root cause analysis and the proactive resolution of issues that directly influence real-time user experience.

Conviva’s observability solution uses an innovative Experience-Centric methodology, collecting comprehensive user data and prioritizing any issue that influences the user experience. It offers teams insight into how performance issues correspond to the user experience in real time. This enables teams to prioritize effectively. Experience-Centric Observability (ECO) gives teams a clear view of how the quality of experience they offer impacts customers’ long-term engagement.

One of the primary reasons for the emphasis on quality of experience is its profound impact on customer retention. Conviva’s data reveals that mature video publishers may lose up to 1.7 million subscribers annually because of unresolved QoE issues. Unlike outages, which occur infrequently and impact a large number of viewers at once, QoE issues happen around the clock and can affect millions of viewers per year per publisher. They have an overwhelming influence on customer retention.

Traditional observability and application performance monitoring (APM) tools have historically focused on monitoring quality of service (QoS). What makes Conviva’s ECO so groundbreaking is that QoE takes center stage instead. Traditional observability tools primarily monitor latency, traffic, errors, and saturation, but ECO enables companies to focus on what customers are experiencing. 

By measuring customer experience and connecting their engagement to backend performance across the entire user journey, Conviva’s platform offers unparalleled insight into the moments that matter most. From application launch to video playback, or any interaction in between, Conviva’s Experience-Centric Observability ensures that organizations can detect and resolve issues that impact user satisfaction and engagement.

With Conviva’s ECO service, organizations gain access to advanced capabilities such as census-level data ingestion, advanced event contextualization, no-code server-side metric creation, real-time data visualization, and AI-driven alerting that includes root cause analysis. By leveraging these capabilities, businesses can prioritize issues based on their cumulative impact on QoE.