Value Metric
Confidence Rating
Confidence Rating captures how confident users feel that they completed a task correctly.
What is Confidence Rating?
Confidence Rating measures a user’s subjective certainty that they did a task right — typically a post-task question like "How confident are you that you completed this task correctly?" on a rating scale. It reveals a subtle but important failure mode: users who technically succeed but are unsure, and users who fail yet believe they succeeded.
Because confidence shapes whether people trust and continue using a product, it is a valuable complement to objective success and error metrics.
How to calculate it
Confidence Rating = Average of Post-Task Confidence Scores
- Confidence Scores
- Individual post-task confidence ratings
- Responses
- Number of respondents
Worked example
If 25 users rate confidence on a 7-point scale summing to 140, average confidence = 140 ÷ 25 = 5.6.
What good looks like
- Match confidence to realityHigh and accurate
The goal is high confidence that matches actual success. Watch for gaps: confident failures and unsure successes are both usability problems.
Why it matters
Confidence drives continued use and trust. Users who finish a task but feel unsure hesitate, double-check, or abandon later; users who fail but feel confident carry away wrong outcomes without knowing. Comparing confidence to actual success rate exposes where feedback and confirmation are missing, so you can close the gap between how users feel and how they actually did.
How to improve Confidence Rating
Give clear feedback and confirmation
Confirm success explicitly and show state changes so users know they did it right, raising warranted confidence.
Investigate confidence–success gaps
Where confidence and actual success diverge, interview users to learn what misled or reassured them.
Frequently asked questions
Why measure confidence separately from task success?
Because they can diverge in revealing ways. A user may complete a task but feel unsure — a sign of missing feedback — or fail while believing they succeeded, which is even more dangerous. Comparing confidence to actual success exposes gaps that success rate alone hides.
How do you raise user confidence?
Provide clear, timely feedback: confirm actions, show state changes, and summarize outcomes so users know they did the task correctly. Reducing ambiguity in labels and next steps also raises confidence — ideally confidence that accurately reflects real success.