Decibel launches a Score for digital experience

Experience may be a subjective thing, but London-based Decibel has launched a platform to score its digital embodiment. The new Digital Experience Intelligence platform generates a Digital Experience Score, or DXS, ranging from a low of 1 to a high of 10. The Score is intended to establish a user’s state of mind when interacting with a website or mobile app, and the London-based analytics firm says this is the first time such scoring has been available at scale. CEO Ben Harris, who described this new Score as “absolutely game-changing,” told me that the platform employs five categories of metrics. There’s Distance, gauging how far a mouse or scroll movement travels, and Velocity, to detect the speed of user actions. Movement tracks right, left, up or down, Focus shows how long a user is engaged, and Hesitation conveys hovering without clicking. Here’s a screen from the platform’s dashboard:

Algorithms then determine levels of three states of mind: Frustration, Confusion and Engagement, which are combined to create the Score as a way of quantifying the user’s overall quality of engagement. To date, the platform has been employed on about 300 sites or apps, Harris said, adding that, although brands can use the platform to sample its screens, it can also track user behavior across every screen in a given property to gather the necessary data. Generally, it takes a couple of weeks to arrive at a Score. Harris didn’t have information on whether any brands had scored a perfect 10 or a dismal 1, or what the average Score was. Harris noted that most brands are “focused on the conversion rate instead of optimization for experience,” and this Score can be employed to determine progress in improving experience. There are no stats yet to validate whether a Score of 8, for instance, results in more sales. The most important factor, he said, is the percentage of positive or negative change in a given site or app compared to previous Scores, so a brand can evaluate the results of its efforts. Harris added that a brand can compare the Experience Score to changes in its Net Promoter Score (NPS), which measures the willingness of customers to recommend a product or service. Or it can compare the Score to session replays or other assessments, to see if it tracks with those measurements. He sees the DXS as a new kind of KPI, which can then be utilized by, say, a customer relationship management system, a customer data platform or a data management platform as an additional attribute for profiles. An API allows the platform’s data to be shared with those and other tools.